Earlier this year I saw the post about Big Bad Wolf Booksale. A TWENTY FOUR HOUR book sale that would last NINE days. As a big fan of books, the ad left me very excited but at the same time a little cautious. The Manila International Book Fair for me is usually a hit and miss with all the different vendors.
I admit that I am quite late to post this. In my defense, I was busy reading the books I got haha.
I was lucky enough to snag some Preview Day tickets! The Big Bad Wolf team really kept themselves active in social media. The first event was Preview Day ticket giveaways. Just the other day was a contest that would have 10 lucky winners running around the book sale for 5 minutes to pick up any book they wanted. (I am jealous!)
To the Big Bad Wolf Book Sale
So I get to World Trade Center on the Preview Day at around 10am. The line seemed long but I still got in pretty quick. First thing I see is a Metrobank ATM. This was a sign of things to come. Only had about 500php in my wallet.
I head into the hall and the first thing I see are hobbies and crafts book. Someone at the door offers me a cart but I refuse it. I took a look around one row of books then turned around to get a cart!
First tenants of my cart are art books and graphic novels! Since the graphic novels were right next to the fiction area, I was starting to see a crowd. Navigating through a crowd of people looking at books with carts is rather challenging. I have a bump on my hip where someone hit me with their cart. This was when I thought I’d use the customer storage. I left all my books there and was told that I could leave them there until closing. I was then able to freely walk around the crowd and pick out a bunch of novels I wanted.
Most of the books had sample versions you can look through in case you were curious about a book. I found that really useful when I was looking inside art books.
Prices
The prices were surprising. The children’s section had these small packs of activity books with small toys for only 40php. The soft bound Hunger Games books I got were 190php each. Hard bound of the Bone Clocks were 230. Found some graphic novels at 290 each! Got some art books for less than 700!
Hide and Seek
One of the biggest challenges when shopping in the Big Bad Wolf sale? Finding a book you saw earlier. I had a little chat with one of the volunteers and asked how all the books were arranged. All the price tags show what category the books are in. Each category has a section in the hall. I was told that aside from that, the books were placed on their category areas according to what box they opened up first. This made finding book series without boxed sets a bit of a challenging.
I spent 2 hours looking for a specific children’s book I saw earlier and book 2 of Daughters of Smoke & Bone. While looking, I also came across another person looking for a specific book because she accidentally took the sample copy.
Haul
In the end, I came out of there with 17 books. All of them weighing around 11kg. I realized I was in for a rough commute home. WORTH IT!
There were books that were absent. There were only so many sci-fi and fantasy books. Only one book of Harry Potter and only a handful of Anne Rice. Because of this, I googled about Big Bad Wolf. All these books are overprints. A nice little info is that a portion of the sales go to Gawad Kalinga as well. There is a more info in this Rappler post and BBW’s Facebook page.
Thanks Big Bad Wolf! I am now set for a few weeks of reading. Until next year!
