The Greater St. Louis Book Fair Celebrates Its 59th Year: One of the Biggest Charity Book Fairs in the Country

West County Shopping Mall is located in Des Peres, Missouri just outside of St. Louis. It's an older mall that was recently updated to include some new shops and fresh new design features. There are plans in the works to complete an outside "shopping town" feature at the mall. It seems that the old style enclosed shopping malls of the past are on their way out, to be replaced with malls that resemble small villages with lots of patio restaurants and outside "green" spaces.

The city of Des Peres is typical middle to upper class suburbia with the mall in the center, anchored by the intersection of two major highways, a hospital, office buildings, a movie multiplex, and what seems like about a dozen strip malls. Ringing around the business core is a collection of older ranch style homes that were probably built during the housing boom of the fifties. It's a busy area of the city with quite a bit of convenience, noise and traffic.

If you hang around the mall this time of year in the first part of May, you'll notice a lot of extra activity going on. The stores are getting a little busier as the weather warms and school starts letting out for the summer. Get there early in the morning and you'll see the mall walkers: senior citizens in sweat suits and running shoes with CD or Mp3 players in their ears. They walk at a brisk, determined pace, around and around the mall, sometimes just in the food court so it's easier for them to stop and have coffee and chat.

When you first enter the mall in the first week of May, you may notice that there's a line of semi tractor-trailer trucks lined up near the entrance to the covered parking garage. Yellow markers mark off the entrance to the garage as a line of workers unloads the trucks. They sort of look like dedicated ants passing the big brown boxes from one to another down the line and into the garage. It starts on Monday and goes on for days, night and day. If you sneak a look inside of the parking garage, you'll notice row after row of folding tables set up between the parking lines. The boxes and tables are for the Greater St. Louis Book Fair.