We visited the Deventer Book Market today, which takes place along the IJssel river quayside and in the city center’s pedestrian zone. Said to be the largest second hand book market in Europe, with some 600 vendors. In earlier years there have been well over 100.000 visitors, but today was predicted to be very rainy, so there were likely much less people around than that. Actually it remained mostly dry until after lunch and we had a pleasant stroll through the town and stocked up on books for Y to read, some old SF pockets for me, and some books for E too. Just as we drove away the heavy rains really arrived.

It has been many years since E and I last were at the Deventer book market (it had been 8 years since we last were in Deventer at all). As on a visit almost two decades ago, what stood out is how with the streets filled with many people browsing all those book stalls, how very very quiet it is. So much so that we thought the kitchen sounds and table conversations around us at lunch to be noisy in contrast.

The ca. 1530 Weigh House overlooking some of the book stalls

The majority of the stalls are along the IJssel river quayside. In the background the Wilhelmina bridge, originally built 1939-1943, blown by retreating German forces in 1945, rebuilt 1948 using the original design. This bridge was used in the movie ‘A Bridge Too Far‘ about the allied landings in/around Arnhem, as a stand in for the bridge in Arnhem itself (because there too modern buildings surround the bridge for the 1945 setting of the movie).

What AI can do, we can do better. A sign on a stall of a group of professional book translators we briefly chatted with.