WHY I LOVE BOOKEXPO

The book business is a subset of the American Entertainment Industry, a fact of life I sometimes forget given my particular vantage point in a bookshop across the street from a major university.

And the glamour and romance of the book business seems like a distant memory these days, seen from the frontline bookseller trenches. We’re all a little shell shocked and getting a bit long in the tooth for this sort of thing, but with bayonets fixed we prepare to move a few precious yards forward, hoping we won’t incur more casualties in the process.

I love BookExpo because it’s like waking from a bad dream. Actually, it might be more accurate to say it’s like falling into a deep opium-induced three-day sleep. You get many free prepublication copies of excellent books, you see brother and sisterbooksellers, fellow combatants in the War on Illiteracy, you are treated like you’re special by the publishers, and you meet real celebrities.

Two years ago my daughter’s boy friend had his picture taken with Bobby “Bacala” Baccalieri from the Sopranos, who had written a cookbook. I had a photo op with a lady in a Dora The Explorer* costume (which raised my stature considerably with my granddaughter). Many years ago I saw Cindy Crawford up close, despite the fact that she was surrounded by a phalanx of body guards. Ms. Crawford’s hair looked shellacked—like if she was standing in a wind tunnel, her hair wouldn’t move an inch. And at an Oxford University Press party on an aircraft carrier docked in New York harbor, Monica Lewinsky told one of my staff that her high top sneakers were “very cool.”

What surprises await us this year?

Going to BookExpo is like being inside People magazine for three days. More than three days a year there might permanently damage a person, but this is just about right.

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*I lucked into this. At the time the photo was taken, I didn’t know who Dora was. I saw what appeared to be an odd hydrocephalic figure lumbering slowly down the children’s book aisle with a marketing person holding a Polaroid.
Stepping out with Miss Dora: What happens at Book Expo stays at BookExpo