Bargains of the book world
STUDENTS of St Paul's Secondary School were able to find out for themselves whether books are truly mankind's ultimate source of wealth at a recent joint school function held in the school hall.
The Joint School Book Exhibition was organised by a team of student librarians from St Paul's Secondary School and Wah Yan College (Hong Kong).
The annual event aims to show students the variety of books available and give them a chance to buy at discounted prices.
Exhibition committee chairman Amy Ho said the organising committee began preparing for the exhibition last October.
''Since the committee was made up of students from both schools, it was not always easy to reach a consensus.'' She told Young Post that it was also difficult to get sponsorship for the event.
''After great effort, we secured direct sponsorship from some companies while others preferred to sponsor us in the printing of posters and pamphlets and so on,'' Amy said.
More than 2,000 books were displayed including works of fiction, reference books, biographies, novels, comics, poetry as well as books for special interests, such as cooking, paper-craft and needlework.
Teachers, mainly in the Chinese and English languages, brought classes to the hall during school hours to recommend books.
Librarians from the two organising schools were also on hand to help students make purchases. Discounts of between 10 and 20 per cent were offered by book suppliers.
The most popular books among the senior students were English fiction such as Agatha Christie's detective stories and Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind .
Among the junior forms, book versions of popular movies, such as Jurassic Park and The Addams Family were very popular, while the Peanuts series was predictably one of the best sellers.
Among Chinese books, science fiction, thrillers and novels (especially those written by Taiwanese author Queng Yao) were very popular.
After running at St Paul's, the exhibition moved to Wah Yan College, Hong Kong.
Said joint chairman of the organising committee, Tony Chan Hing-tao: ''Basically, we have displayed books in the same categories as at St Paul's, but due to the different interests of boys and girls, some categories will have a wider choice of books, forinstance, novels on martial arts.'' In addition, stalls selling electronic dictionaries and stationery, which were not to be found at St Paul's, were included at the Wah Yan College exhibition.
