This morning, as dependable as the leaves falling on Belfast's Malone Road, several hundred bibliophiles will queue up in disorderly fashion to rummage through thousands of books at the city's annual book fair in the Wellington Park Hotel.
A walk around the Belfast Book Fair - which this year is celebrating its 25th birthday - is a tour through hundreds of years of Irish publishing history covering politics, architecture, transport, social affairs, sport, art, music, archaeology, natural history, folklore, fiction and much else besides. Forty dealers from throughout Ireland - some from as far away as Schull, Co Cork - will set up temporary shop showcasing their antiquarian and second-hand wares. British and American dealers may also drop in. Last year a buyer from Princeton University came specifically to build up a collection of the work of Irish playwrights.
The fair is a reassuring social occasion. Many people come to renew friendships and, in between swapping news and gossip, to soak up the atmosphere of bibliomania. Some come for pleasure, others for plunder, but for most it is more than just a hobby; it is an addiction on a par with alcohol, drugs or solvents and they need their adrenalin fix.
The main feast for the literary-minded is the line-up of 20th-century authors with their 21st-century collectability. Some well-known names turn up each year in pristine dust wrappers. Flann O'Brien stands shoulder to shoulder with Brendan Behan, while Joyce, Beckett, O'Casey and Kavanagh sit snugly beside Brian Moore, Padraic Colum and J.M. Synge.
That prolific traveller H.V. Morton will be well represented; so too the geographer Estyn Evans and the natural historian Robert Lloyd Praeger whose works are always to the fore (three years ago his book on weeds sold for €150.00). Scour the shelves and you'll find rare, slim volumes from the 1960s by Seamus Heaney and Michael Longley, sitting proudly alongside their much-loved predecessor Louis MacNeice in the 100th anniversary of his birth. Belfast, where MacNeice was born "between the mountain and the gantries", commemorated his life and work in September and the afterglow of the celebrations still lingers. An exhibition just ended at Queen's University told the legendary story of how, as a BBC producer in 1961, MacNeice was visited by a team of management consultants.
Consultants: "We see, Mr MacNeice, that during the past six months you have produced only one programme. Can you tell us what you were doing the rest of the time?"
MacNeice: "Thinking."
The true fun of the book fair is in the joy of serendipity - finding an out-of-print title or browsing through the local studies section and coming across a history of the Lough Erne Drainage Scheme might just make someone's day.
For children, or those readers who have just grown older but not grown up in their literary tastes, you can be guaranteed Enid Blyton, Biggles, Rupert the Bear, and large helpings of that old favourite, the fat Owl of the Remove, Billy Bunter. Bunter fans of a certain vintage will recall that 40 years ago you could purchase the Cassell edition (in its distinctive yellow dust jacket) of Billy Bunter's Beanfeast for nine shillings and sixpence in two of Belfast's most elegant but sadly long- gone bookshops, Mullan's and Erskine Mayne. Now you need a fistful of notes to buy a copy.
Each year produces a mouth-watering highlight, and this year there are two. To mark the 25th anniversary, the organisers Jiri Books are offering the first complete two-volume facsimile of the Book of Kells and its elder "sister" the Book of Durrow. In the early 1950s, only 550 sets of the Book of Kells were produced in fine vellum by the Swiss firm Urs Graf-Verlag with special permission from Trinity College. The Durrow set, one of 660, was produced by the same firm in 1960, and is bound in brown pigskin with the commentary volume quarter-bound in matching pigskin and lovat boards. In the opinion of the organisers it is in excellent condition and still in the original cardboard shipping boxes.
While books about Ireland remain the speciality of many dealers, the browser with a broader taste in literature will find a rich assortment of international authors. Walt Whitman, Dostoevsky, Henry Thoreau, Jane Austen, Mark Twain, as well as a range of modern authors are on display.
With the demise of so many second hand bookshops, partly because of the impact of internet sales, it is heartening to see this trade still thriving. Nothing can beat the sniff of a rare first edition, the feel of a shiny leather tome, a flick through a stained dog-eared paperback, or even a scruffy ex-library copy of a long-sought biography (waf - "with all faults", in the book dealers' lingo).
Although all tastes will be catered for, with everything from paperbacks to large-format coffee table volumes, those in search of a bargain are in the wrong place. When the first fair was held in 1982 it may have been possible to pick up some books for a snip, but nowadays everyone is an expert. Since those days the bookselling landscape has also changed considerably. Twenty-five years ago Belfast boasted more than 30 bookshops, at least half of them second-hand. Now, apart from charity shops, there are only a small number of second-hand shops left in the city. For those planning to visit the Wellington Park Hotel today, it's worth remembering the old book-buying maxim: "The early bird always gets the best literary pickings" - dust jacket, naturally, slightly foxed.