This year, more than one million calls will be received by Lifeline Australia, callers can be lonely, depressed, victims of domestic abuse and some are suicidal.

Lifeline Central West executive officer Alex Ferguson said all funds raised at this weekend’s book fair will go to train new crisis support workers for the charity’s Bathurst, Orange and Dubbo call centres.

“Mental health and depression worries are going north and for Lifeline to be able to cope with it all we need to be continuing to expand and grow our workforce,” he said.

Recently, it was revealed that 2866 people died by suicide last year, Australian Bureau of Statistics data shows.

At the time Mr Ferguson called for more to be done to address what he said was a national emergency.

“Politicians don’t like talking about it [suicide] … it’s not a sexy topic, it’s a bloody awful topic,” Mr Ferguson said.

“We’ve got to stop sweeping it under the table.”

Mr Ferguson said the book fair was created a number of years ago to help support the charity in the Central West.

Last year’s two book fairs raised almost $70,000 and once again all funds raised this weekend will go to the charity.

Prices start at just $1, with a large coffee table style book for $10, and all funds raised will go to the three Central West call centres.

Thousands of books will be on sale and they have been organised by genre, with fiction, children, romance, history and cooking among some of the categories.

Mr Ferguson said the fair had built a “solid base of supporters” in past years and he was hopeful it would be well supported this weekend.

“There’s a huge range of high-quality well-priced books,” he said.

Also at the fair will be hundreds of DVDs, with a huge range of titles to appeal to any movie lover.

The book fair is on from 8.30am until 4pm on Saturday, and 10am until 2pm on Sunday.

Entry is by gold coin and donations are welcomed.