The Publishing World Post #5: "The Book Fair"

As tempting as I found the blog review of Jeff Gomez’s Print is Dead, I’ve decided to neglect electronic publishing this week and focus on a much more accepted facet of the world of words: the book fair. With last week’s class on rights and all the buzz flying around the net about deals and discoveries, I decided to look into current fairs held across the country. My experiences with the Miami Book Fair had nothing to do with rights purchases; if I went to Frankfurt, however, it seems highly unlikely that I’d mingle elbow-to-elbow with bargain hunters in front of tents filled with books or stand in single-file lines waiting for Madeline Albright, Dave Barry, Ken Burns, or Scott Turrow to sign a first edition I’d picked up after a lecture. Both have their important roles in the publishing process, but with only two examples didn’t paint a clear picture of book fairs’ influence. With the help of the Library of Congress’s Center for the Book I was able to get a better picture of American fairs like the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, BookExpo America , the Patchwork Tales Storytelling Festival, the Sarasota Reading Festival, the Arizona Book Festival, and the Printers Row Book Fair, all of which have different purposes and methods of drawing its audience. The Los Angeles Times Festival of Books is most like the Miami Book Fair: publishers sell to the public, authors talk to the public, the community gathers together for a massive cultural event, and big names dazzle the crowd. BookExpo, on the other hand, is all about the business, publisher to publisher. As a professional gathering, the BEA is much more like Frankfurt, focusing on rights, the culture of the market (not cultural events), and the future of the trade. The Patchwork Tales Storytelling Festival, held annually in Rock Hill, South Carolina, eschews all commercialism and focuses solely on words. For a few days, words and oral traditions are revitalized. Where does publishing come in? Not really anywhere. By including it—and a large helping of other word-related, but not book-specific events—the Library of Congress adds an air of credibility to an essential part of the culture and use of language, albeit it is not one found at Frankfurt or the BEA. The Sarasota Reading Festival likely draws a larger crowd than Patchwork Tales, but throws all of its events into a solid day of literacy. Like other audience-oriented book events, this small fair attracts the residents of Hillsborough County, Florida with big names like Lou Dobbs, Barbara Taylor Bradford, and Gene Wilder. Attending the Sarasota Reading Festival might be less daunting than weaving through California crowds or spending a week navigating South Florida traffic. The Arizona Book Fair was the same way for years—a small, but respectable fair—but it attracted even smaller authors and smaller audiences. After ten years in the Carnegie Center (a historic and recently renovated landmark in Phoenix owned by the Arizona Public Library), the Arizona Book Fair is in desperate need of a new venue and faces a long, indefinite hiatus if one isn’t located. Money must have played an issue in the decision, though corporate sponsors like Target and Borders look like promising signs. The final fair I surveyed—the Printers Row Book Fair—has much different history. Established twenty-two years ago by the Near South Planning Board in Chicago, this fair was not initially meant to host rights deals or multi-cultural talks or the biggest bestsellers. Printers Row was “once the city’s bookmaking hub” (and well-named at that), so the neighborhood decided to attract business using its historic market. Within seven years, the one block fair had grown almost ten times its size and was actually purchased by the Chicago Tribune. Now, it’s not just a fair with a tie to the city’s history, but an important player in its neighborhood’s future and a fair as commercially successful as its Californian and Floridian competitors. Other fairs are very specific about audience, focusing on collectible books or children’s literature or a single author’s work or a theme or a setting, and fairs of all types range from bustling to intimate to unknown. But each has a purpose. When the Miami Book Fair hosts its events at the Miami-Dade Community College Campus, volunteers from the inner-city college witness the meetings of minds that they may not have imagined possible; its multi-cultural and poly-lingual focus engages the diverse community of South Florida, linguistic scholars, and publishers from around the world. School children are offered the gift of stories despite their reading levels at fairs like Patchwork Tales, and traditions like Southern “lies” are kept alive and well, even as the electronic age speeds ahead. Neighborhoods like Printers Row are remembered for their historic importance. Deals are made, royalties are boosted, elbows are rubbed, and for brief moments in every month of the year, communities across the United States are dragged away from their televisions and video games and into a literate, educated, and exciting world that I find simply intoxicating. I don’t know how many books are sold at any given fair, or how much a random publishing company could expect to gain or lose as an exhibitor, but when the Library of Congress can list one hundred and ninety fairs, most of which are in the US and held annually, it’s obvious that the tradition is not going anywhere soon.