The most magical time of the year is not DECEMBER it is in fact JANUARY (the month of glorious, smelly old books!) Lifeline book fest is akin to Christmas, Hanukkah and my Birthday, In fact every year I come in armed with a trolley bag and steely determination to nab every good book I find. But you ain't got to be no square to enjoy books, from Tolstoy, Dancing Cat's and Bird Watching almanacs to Snoop Doggy Doggs ABC, Bookfest has got you covered. I like to start off in the RARE EXPENSIVE section and gradually wheeze my way to the children's books. (Don't tell me you don't want Roald Dahls BFG on your bookcase.) Bookfest is likely to steal away your whole day so really do try and come prepared. It's best to come on the first couple of days before the best books are nabbed, also PLEASE do account for food stuffs otherwise you'll wind up shaking, confused and clutching the sport biography of Michael Clark (Asiya circa 2010) read more

Lifeline Bookfest - Festivals Near Me - South Brisbane, QLD

It's the night before Lifeline Bookfest and I'm acting like a five year old does on Christmas Eve. I'm making wishlists, setting my alarm, and trying to drink as much warm milk as I can manage because I JUST CAN'T SLEEP. I'm too excited. Lifeline Bookfest is held at the Brisbane Convention Centre bi-annually. It's a Save The Date kind of affair. Basically, an entire libraries worth of books is dumped and strewn throughout an exhibition hall and put on sale for dirt cheap prices. There are literally MOUNTAINS of books to sift through. It's not all chaos though, the books are categorised by genre. You'll be able to navigate through the aisles easily enough if you can manage to move amid the crowd. Favourites among the crowd are the HQ (High Quality) section, and the games section. Looking for a backgammon board or a game of Cluedo? You'll find it here. Several of them. You'd do well to get in early. There are hoardes of people that travel all across Brisbane for this event. People use trollies instead of book bags. It is an all out frenzy. You'll only be able to move an inch at a time through the aisles because you'll be immersed in a thick soup of crazed book worms getting high on stale book smell. The best part is listening to the public announcements while you're browsing. There's always calls for missing people and lost children. The guy who does the call outs is sardonic and funny as hell. He alone is worth coming down for. read more

Happening for a whole week, twice a year; rows and rows of secondhand books priced anywhere between $1 to $20 (for those super rare finds!); donating to a great cause... what more could you ask for? I was a patron for 2 years before deciding that it's not enough and I need to become a volunteer. The volunteer management team is amazing and they let us think that we're doing all the work, but they restack the books every night until 2am! Come by when it's on, they have books of all kinds (one man's trash is the next man's treasure!) and you'll easily fill up all of the bookshelves at your home in no time! read more

One of my 2012 NYE resolutions was to attend this famed book lovers' event. Somehow I'd managed to miss it up until now, but this time I made sure I checked it out. Tagging along with a friend I met strolling through my 'hood of West End, we cruised down Boundary towards the Brisbane Convention & Entertainment Centre, our respective book-seeking missions in the front of our attention. My friend was set on settling in for a whole day and stocking up for the year ahead. I was intent on ducking into the cheap section and unearthing at least one little gem from all the flotsam and jetsam. Walking up the stairs and into the foyer of the Bookfest you wouldn't really know of the hive of activity inside (perhaps it's because of the way people tend to pipe down into library-mode when they encounter such a mass of literature; it's definitely much more orderly than the more unseemly exhibitions held at BCEC, like 'Sexpo' for example, or so I've heard... ahem). The Bookfest space is divided into the cheaper, older titles and the more expensive, newer (& purportedly 'higher quality') products. I only dabbled with the former. It was great fun rifling through the miscellany and savouring the heady aroma of aged paper. Publications are divided into categories like 'Childrens', 'Non Fiction' etc which are denoted by blue & white placards. My favoured hunting ground was the mysterious 'Unsorted Books' zone: a land that editor's forgot, permeated by an emphasis on religiosity, strange diets and quite a few titles by former Aussie cricketer and sports commentator Max Walker (unfortunately I was a bit low on cash and had to put back 'How to Puzzle a Python' in order to secure a higher priority choice). On the day I unpriced books from 'Unsorted Books' were $1 each, but apparently on the last day they do a bag for $1. I only had a handful of shrapnel so I had to pare down my choices to one, opting for a espionage thriller by a British author which bore respectable reviews on the back cover*. I was served by a production line of old dears who took my money, gave me my receipt and unnecessarily bagged and tagged my book with Rotary Club zeal. How sweet. * I'm four chapters in and happy to say it doesn't suck. read more

First time coming to this, but boy was I unprepared. I got there on the first day, thinking I'd get the cream of the crop... Didn't even get through 2 full rows in the 3 hours I was there. Digging through the piles of hard-to-find, rare, and just plain odd kept me entertained for waaaaay too long. Serious lack of judgement there, so I'll be coming for rounds 2 and 3 next weekend I'd imagine. I did however leave with a whole bunch of great books, nice leather-bound or limited edition sets and some awesome records all for basically $1-$5 each. Pretty much all the books are under $2.50. Only gripe I had that, was that people would pick up a book, walk around with it then decide they don't want it, leaving it in a random section, but also on top of the neatly organized books. This meant that people who would pull out a book later, would also 'add to the pile' if they didn't like it rather than put it back in it's place like earlier in the day. read more

I had been waiting for 18th Jan 2014!! This is a heaven for bookworms!! I went to this event last year for the first time. This year, they divide the hall into three sections, namely, High Quality, all $2.50 and all $1 I was with my friends and we spent 2 hours yesterday but it was not enough at all!! So I will be back today and maybe another day this week. Bring your big strong bags! You can hire a hopping trolley for $2. (NB: Please keep reminding yourself whether your cart is in other people's way) p.s. I visited yesterday (19th) as well! So far I bought 1 dictionary and 3 books for learning Spanish, 1 book about body language and 1 book on customer behaviour for my study at uni. My friends bought many paper back fictions. There are CDs, records and DVDs, too. read more

Every year I count down the days, not to Christmas or Easter or my birthday, but to the Lifeline Bookfest. It's a once year (approximately) booklovers event, when thousands upon thousands of second-hand books fill up rows of trestle tables lined up in a giant hall in the Convention Centre. Here you will find every kind of book, magazine and board game imaginable, all pre-loved but some more so than others. The hall is divided into three sections, there's my favourite, the 50 cent bargain section, the mid-range $2-3 section and then the better quality book section which ranges from $7 for a new looking paperback to a lot more for one of the rare books. If you make the mistake of not taking any large book bags or better yet, a granny trolley, there are green bags available to buy or trolleys to hire. The trolleys just about make things worse, however, as you end up far to encumbered to adequately navigate the narrow aisles crowded with fellow booklovers and their enormous book bags! It's best to get there early so as to have an hour or two before it gets really crowded and too nab a free carpark in the surrounding streets. Set yourself aside a whole day to peruse the dusty piles (and take some zyrtec if you're prone to allergies!) and take snacks so as to avoid hunger pains when you don't want to leave. read more

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I had to ban myself from going to the Lifeline Bookfest for a few years there. Everything is so cheap and you come across so many interesting books that I always ended up with large garbage bags full of books and a long, heavy, walk to the train home. Every January, one of the usually fairly dull and bland spaces in the Brisbane Convention and Exhibition Centre is transformed into a massive warehouse of preloved books. I would HATE to have to help set this event up because it's huge and the idea of having to attempt to categorise thousands of books into approximate genres and sections is the stuff my nightmares are made of. I'll happily reap the benefits though. The volunteers at Bookfest are lovely and seem to be enjoying themselves. The prices that have been allocated to each book are very generous, and you could fill a shelf on your bookcase with little more than spare change upon a trip to Bookfest. After a couple of years off from Bookfest while I regained some book-buying discipline (lol, I totally didn't. I just gave heaps away last year so I had space for new books), I returned to Bookfest this year to find it as awe-inspiring as ever. If you have a car, I'd definitely recommend driving to Bookfest or you'll be in for a back-breaking commute home. Good, clean, musty fun! read more

Books. All of the Books. Twice a year. All of the Books. Come early. Bring a Nana Shopping Trolley. It'll save your arm. Go in for the high quality or score a bargain in the $1 section. Have a list of wish list books. Abandon it and buy so many more. Feel good because you're helping charity. See two women fighting over a copy of one book. See way too many copies of The Hunger Games and Twilight. Shudder. Swear you're not coming back this year but know in your heart you'll visit at least three times before it closes next weekend. Marvel at the serious Bookfest-ers that wear gloves. Dedication, man, dedication. Come home, stack your books and feel chuffed you've got all the reading material you could ask for (for at least 3 months anyway).... read more

This is the event I get most excited about every year, more so than my own birthday. Because it's like a birthday where I buy a crudload of gifts for myself. The Lifeline Bookfest is exactly what it sounds like: It is a festival. Of books. And what a festival! The fair is separated into four areas: low quality books aka "Go Nuts and Fill A Plastic Bag For Real Cheap Book Suckaaaas" to "These Books Are Pretty Good and Thus Moderately Priced" to "Contemporary Fiction and Non Fiction That People Have Read Once and Since Discarded From Their Lives Give Us Your Money" to "Antique Books, Priceless Memorablia and Real Dusty Things". The most I've spent at the Bookfest is $50 and I came home with 40 books. You'll find a wide range of genres stocked, from literature, to sci-fi, to books specifically about pruning roses. There are also jigsaw puzzles, records and CDs, and comics. The next Lifeline Bookfest is coming up on January 14 2012. Please go! I'll be the person passed out in the corner because I've forgotten to eat and drink. There is also a man in a safari hat that just strolls around holding a megaphone and bellowing things about lifeline, books, and lost children. Not to mention balloons for the young 'uns! These Bookfests come around every few months or so. Keep your eye out for the banners, which are usually hanging across Wickham St in Fortitude Valley. A few tips: - Bring a portable trolley (not one stolen from Woolworths, that would be too obvious), or a suitcase on wheels if you're planning on stocking up. I've been to the Bookfest twice without and I've always come home with a sore back and arms from carrying too many books, not to mention waiting in a long queue with too many books. - Wear gloves if you are a germ conscious, or at least bring hand sanitiser. I can guarantee that your hands will be grey after an expedition to the Bookfest. Who said literature was ever clean. read more

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okay i'm going in to this as a person who does not buy books.... ever. i buy dvds, games, toys, comics and other such things. i'm also going in to this telling you that i visit many op shops, pawn brokers, tip shops, charity stores, garage sales and church fetes so i know how to get actual bargains. i'm used to paying less then $3 for anything i may buy at an op shop and going in to bookfest this year i was extremely disappointed in their prices. of course i raided the unpriced section for all it was worth grabbing any ps1 game i could find mixed in with the computer software, and hey for a buck why shouldn't I? i even found a few things in the priced section (where everything was $2.50, even cds and really bad condition dvds that i could've bought with a warranty for $1-$3 at any cash converters) but when i came to the "high quality" section i had to do a freakin double take when i saw some of the prices. $20 for cod: black ops, $10 for harry potter and the philosophers stone on dvd, $15 for a damn vhs board game!!! those prices are insane and most of it was in horrible condition, the copy of black ops had so many scratches i doubt it would play even after buffing it! what really annoyed me was that every ps2 game, every xbox game, every 360, ps3, wii and psp game was in this "high quality section" now in an op shop i might pay $3 to $5 for a video game depending on what it is. but every ps2 and xbox game was $12!! every xbox 360, ps3 and wii game was $20!! i told them hey you guys know that publishers stopped making original xbox games in like 2006 don't you (fifa and madden dont count) and that the ps2 had just been officially discontinued by sony themselves because no one was making games for it anymore? they told me they sell for the prices they set them at. why? because bookfest is overpriced! i've always known $2.50 for a used book was way too much. every year though i see people spend like $150 at bookfest and walk away smiling, but i'm a little craftier then them, i have patience. i don't have to pay $10 for a puzzle (missing pieces may i add) when i know that through patience i will find it at a garage sale for $2. i also realised that bookfest isn't primarily for thrifty people, it's more for people that pay normal thrift store prices (say $4 for a dvd or $3-$6 for a book) and think that bookfest is a great bargain! it ain't people. i love lifeline, i love bookfest and i love charities but until my breath leaves me i will tell people that bookfest is not the best bargain in town!! and only the cashiers at the local cash converters will agree with me. read more