Too many books piling up on your shelves? Transition Haslemere needs secondhand books to recycle to readers and raise funds for its projects – including planting new trees.

We will have a stall at Haslemere’s Christmas Fair on Sunday, December 3 – the town’s biggest event of the year. As usual, we will be selling secondhand books. They are always popular at this time as affordable gifts.

We mainly sell sell paperback popular contemporary fiction and non-fiction, as well as children’s and young adults books. We need to stock up to meet the demand – we typically sell over a hundred books at the Christmas market. 

So if you have any books you would like to pass on, please get in touch with us a [email protected]. We can collect or we can arrange for you can drop them off in central Haslemere. 

Transition also runs its stall at the town’s regular farmers market on the first Saturday of each month in the High Street. We have done so for the past 15 years, supporting the market cooperative and encouraging residents to reduce food miles by buying from local producers. 

Another way we encourage local food is by using a third of our earnings from secondhand book sales to sponsor fruit trees in the National Trust’s orchards at Swan Barn Farm. Hence our stall’s slogan:  ‘Turning books back into trees’.

It costs £250 to cover the lifecycle of a fruit tree, from planting, through pruning, fruit picking and maintenance of the tree and orchard. So far, we have raised enough to plant three apple trees,  all heritage varieties with local origins: two Joybells, which originated in Godalming, and a Bramshott Rectory, named after where the variety first appeared. 

Talking of trees, our new tree warden group has been helping Surrey County Council distribute young trees to local residents to plant in their gardens.

We gave out  number of rowan, crab apple, guelder rose and field maples at a recent session at Haslemere library. All are native trees. The first three are smaller species that have lovely Spring flowers. Rowan and guelder rose have bright autumn leaf colour and red berries. Field maples can grow larger but are rarely a big tree. The give-away is part of Surrey’s aim to plant 1.2 million new trees by 2030 in pursuit of its carbon neutral strategy.

Don’t forget to get in touch at [email protected] if you have books to donate and to come along to our stall at the Christmas market and pick up some stocking fillers.

By Clive Davidson

Clive Davidson has lived in Haslemere for nearly 30 years and has been chair of Transition Haslemere since 2009.