Catch ‘the thrill of the hunt’ at Green Valley Book Fair

MOUNT CRAWFORD Point your car away from Interstate 81 and drive into the fertile farmland of the Shenandoah Valley, past cows standing in fields and silos rising like monuments to rural America.

Turn off a country road onto the driveway of a family farm, park behind an old barn and you will come upon a most unlikely sight:

The world's biggest bookstore. Sort of.

Green Valley Book Fair, south of Harrisonburg, can be found behind the walls of nondescript warehouses stacked with about a half-million books at discounted prices. If you like books, you can lose yourself in here for hours. The book fair is open to the public only a half-dozen times a year for a couple of weeks per session. The final session of the year began Friday and concludes Dec. 13.

The book fair, as owner Michael Evans put it, is in "the middle of nowhere," but that's part of the charm.

"You come out and make a day of it," said Evans, whose parents started the book fair in the 1970s. He now runs the operation with his sister, Michele Miller. "It's a beautiful day, you take a drive and at the end of it you get to shop among books for a while. A friend of mine once told me the thing she loves about the book fair is she finds titles she never knew existed."

It's what Evans refers to as "the thrill of the hunt."

You're not likely to find a lot of current best-sellers here -- today's best-sellers probably will show up at Green Valley in a year or two or maybe three -- but you are likely to find previous titles by current best-selling authors and just about anything else: fiction and nonfiction, obscure titles and classics, books about cooking, crafts and cats. Children's books take up most of a building. The books are new and generally publishers' leftovers, which Green Valley purchases in bulk and then sells for 60 percent to 90 percent off suggested retail prices.

Examples: A hardcover, illustrated edition of David McCullough's "1776" retails for $65 but sells for $10 at Green Valley. A "Polar Express" gift set retails for $25 but sells for $8.

In an age when communication too often is reduced to outshouting one another or tweeting your thoughts in 140 characters or fewer, it's worth noting that a business built on selling something as old-fashioned as books is going strong, despite the lousy economy.

"We are seeing more people come through the door," said Evans, an English major and poet who likes nothing better than poking around the stacks. "I think the need to go out and get the hot new thing has sort of pulled back some."

Green Valley, organized like a bookstore by category, is 25,000 square feet of unhurried shopping. Customers sit on benches, reading excerpts of something just pulled from the shelves; kids curl up in cozy spaces under tables with their own page-turners. On weekends, local church groups sell cold drinks and hot dogs at a cart outside.

Evans estimated 15,000 to 20,000 customers, from all over Virginia and around the country, come through every session. He knows of regulars who plan trips to the area based on the book fair's schedule.

"I come all the time," said Donna Hulver of Winchester. "There's every subject you can think of here. It's a great place."

Tanya Fitzgerald and Jenny Eavers, friends from Stuarts Draft, browsed through the children's section with their 4-year-old sons, Owen Fitzgerald and Wyatt Eavers, who seemed to be having a fine time going from shelf to shelf, seeing what they could find.

They cited selection and price as big allures, but Fitzgerald nodded toward the boys and said: "The best part is getting them reading."

The vast showrooms are far removed from the old barn next door where the book fairs started as an offshoot of the Evanses' auction business. Michael Evans' father, Leighton, loved collecting used books, and when he started selling them at bargain prices in 1971 along with antiques, he discovered that they sold fast and well.

The book business grew without any grand vision, controlled more by demand than supply, Evans said.

"Every time we found a new source for books," he said, "we found we could sell them."

The Evanses constructed the warehouses, purchased books from publishers and opened more often -- but they've never made the leap to open every day. Their schedule of periodic public sessions might not sound like a surefire business model to investors, but it fits the family and their dozen or so full-time staffers just fine.

The selection typically includes more than 20,000 titles but can change wildly from book fair to book fair, which is part of the fun, Evans said. You never know what might be lurking on the shelves.

"If we get one copy of a strange book about a creature that lives on the bottom of a lake in the middle of Antarctica, we don't send it back to the publisher the way it might happen at a regular bookstore," Evans said. "It goes on the shelf, and when that one person comes in who wants it, there it is."

If you're looking for a specific title, a regular bookstore might be a better place for you. Then again, it might be worth a call to the book fair ahead of time just to see if it's available. They won't mind.

"We love the hunt," Evans said with a smile.

Contact Bill Lohmann at (804) 649-6639 or .

Contact Bob Brown at (804) 649-6486 or .