Paul Feain
With more than three decades of experience in antiquarian bookselling, Paul Feain is an expert in the field and the co-founder of the Hong Kong International Antiquarian Bookfair. Before the fifth edition of the fair, fellow book-lover Penny Zhou talks to the friendly Aussie and gets to take a closer look at some of the precious old volumes on display.
HK Magazine: When and how did you get into the antiquarian book business?
Paul Feain: I was a taxi driver in Sydney. I bought a taxi when I was 22, then got married and bought a house. But as a young man, I soon got bored with driving and life, so I started to drive less and less and spend more in bookshops (laughs). In 1980, I finally opened a bookshop—I had tons of books at home so I started with my own books. And things just went from there.
It’s been 31 years now. It was a big challenge at first because I had no idea what I was doing. But I think if you believe in something and are enthusiastic about it, you can pass that enthusiasm onto other people. I’m a reader; but more than that, I love the culture of books. To me, a book is more than just something you read—it tells you more than the words in it. Books are important cultural items, and I’m very passionate about them.
HK: How did you come up with the idea for the fair?
PF: It started off as a concept back six, seven years ago when me and a Japanese friend of mine, Mitsuo Nitta, were in Canada for an event organized by the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, where we looked around and found ourselves with a bunch of European and North American booksellers.
We thought, “This is not really an international body—where is China?” So we decided to organize a book fair in China, and people laughed at us. When we got together the first fair we thought we might get five to six international booksellers to come, but we got swamped once we put out an application form. We eventually had 50 to 60 sellers along.
HK: How do you see the fair has changed in the past five years?
PF: In the first year, the people here were puzzled by it all. A lot of them came in and couldn’t quite work out what it was all about. There were a few sales but not a lot. The next year we had a drop in visitors but more interest from local people. And now we have quite a following.
Each year there’re more familiar faces and we greet each other. I feel like we’re really becoming established as part of the cultural scene in Hong Kong, and we’re really reaching out and educating people about books. We brought east and west together, and have educated a whole lot of western booksellers about China. They’re taking books from or about China far more seriously.
