THE Lifeline Canberra Spring Bookfair opens at Exhibition Park on Friday morning.

One of the biggest second-hand book sales in Australia, book fair organisers expect it to attract more than 13,000 local and interstate buyers.

With prices starting at 50c, the fair will have about 200,000 donated items for sale, including a wide range of fiction and non-fiction books,  rare books and collectables, children’s books and foreign-language books. There will also be magazines, comics, maps and atlases, audio tapes, talking books, records, CDs, videos, DVDs, games and jigsaws.

This year’s autumn book fair raised a record $471,000, about $50,000 up on the previous record, and organisers are hopeful of beating this amount this weekend. All money raised goes towards maintaining the Lifeline Canberra services such as the 24-hour crisis hotline.

Since 1971, Lifeline Canberra has answered more than 500,000 calls and since their inception in 1973, book fairs have raised more than $7m for the charity.