Newborn calves and sun-splashed grounds drew a crowd of more than 30,000 people from across New England to the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society Show and Fair this weekend, making the 148th annual festival a triumph.

“Considering the weather and how hot and humid it was all weekend, everything went fine,” said hall manager Kathy Lobb. “Even [Saturday] night with the threat of bad weather, nobody went into a panic.”

Paul O’Connell is tuckered out. In his first full summer on the Vineyard, the Chilmark Tavern’s head chef has written and rewritten the restaurant menu, negotiated the price of a Menemsha-raked oyster from $1.20 to 80 cents, neglected a cable bill charged to his apartment in Cambridge and soaked up a tan, but only on the appendages that extend outside of his T-shirt and shorts line.

Just before 10 a.m. on opening day, the livestock pens, fried food booths and motionless carnival rides staked in the grounds of the 148th annual Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society Show and Fair were unpeopled and peaceful in the last minutes before the gates opened to a zealous huddle of fairgoers eager to be among the first to sample the spectacles awaiting inside.

At 11 p.m. on Sundays in summer reggae music rumbles underground, three concrete steps beneath Circuit avenue in Oak Bluffs at the Dive Bar. The boom and song of Peter Tosh, Mavado and Sean Paul, earlier sealed surreptitiously in this sunken saloon, swell and rupture to the streets as the party peaks in size and vibrancy.

They come for the fun and festivities or they come to claim a first place prize. No matter the motivation, they come — throngs of people eager to turn the turnstiles onto the grounds of the Martha’s Vineyard Agricultural Society Show and Fair.

Starting Thursday, Island residents and visitors alike will swarm the 148th Annual Agricultural Fair for four days and nights, to hear thrumming tractors and bands of banjos, stain their lips and tongues with blue and red sno-cone juice and dizzy themselves on the chutes of the sky-high carnival slide.

A book can salvage a marriage gone awry. Just ask Island bookbinder Mitzi Pratt.