The Austin Independent Book Fair returns for year three

If you spent your Sunday browsing through local books and listening to Austin writers read their work, you were at the Austin Independent Book Fair. The fair returned for its third year yesterday, September 27, at Radio/East on Montopolis Drive, where it ran from noon to 5 p.m. as a free, all-ages gathering of local authors, small presses, and literary creators. It's the kind of event that rewards a slow walk-around rather than a quick in-and-out, and it's become a reliable fixture for anyone who wants to find out what the city's homegrown writers have been working on.

The fair is built around a few simple activities that run the whole afternoon: readings, networking, browsing the vendor tables, and a book swap. The readings are the heart of it, with both prose and poetry from local writers, and the book swap, hosted by ATX Book Swap, gives you a chance to trade something you've already read for something new. There was even a Clowny Story Time starring OoooLaLa and Lawrie Bird, which kept the all-ages promise real.

Part of what makes the fair work is the venue. Radio/East is the newer sibling to the well-known Radio Coffee & Beer over in South Austin, and it's built for this kind of thing. It's a big, open space with a massive outdoor patio and a large outdoor stage that hosts live local bands, weekly swing dancing nights, and community events most nights, and it keeps the coffee and breakfast tacos going in the morning before switching to cocktails, beer, wine and live music in the evening. The whole place is all ages unless a show says otherwise, and it runs rain or shine, which is a nice safety net for an event that leans so heavily on its outdoor spaces.

For a fair that's only in its third year, it has already carved out a nice niche. It's not a huge, ticketed convention; it's a free afternoon where you can meet the people who wrote the books you're buying and swap a few titles with fellow readers. If you missed this one, the good news is that it's an annual event, so it should be back again next year. In the meantime, Radio/East stays busy with its own lineup of shows and community nights, so it's worth keeping an eye on for whatever comes next. And if you're still looking for a good place to read what you picked up, the venue's patio is a pretty easy spot to settle in with a book and a coffee.