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Footsore but Book Happy
June 3, 2007
It's Sunday afternoon, the last day of BookExpo America , and I have popped into a very deserted office to drop off my three totebag-fulls of BEA loot. Every year I swear to myself that I am not going to pick up any galleys and catalogs except from new small presses since most publishers send me these items on a regular basis. This year I was good and refrained from grabbing everything like a kid in a candy store. Plus covering the numerous book programs and publisher appointments kept me off the floor for a good deal of the first two days. This morning I debated whether to go in for the final day of the show; it is always quiet and there is that melancholy after-the-party feeling when everyone is ready to go home and crash. I was bone tired, especially after a late Saturday night of publisher parties, but since I hadn't really covered the whole exhibit area, felt I needed to go in for a final sweep.
Good thing I did. The first galley I snagged was a signed copy of Alice Sebold's
The Almost Moon (Little Brown, Oct.) her first novel since her highly-touted debut
The Lovely Bones.
It was one of the most-talked-about books at the show and the line was verrry long, snaking down from the booth down the aisle. But the Little, Brown staff moved the line fairly quickly and I only spent 15 minutes in line chatting with a librarian from Plymouth, Massachusetts, who was looking for book ideas for her city's first One Book, One Read program, scheduled to launch in the fall. One particuilar title that intrigued her was
Loving Frank, Nancy Horan's historical novel about architect Frank Lloyd Wright's love affair with the wife of one of his clients
I quickly filled up one tote bag with catalogs and interesting galleys, including Finding Iris Chang: Friendship, Ambition and the Loss of an Extraordinary Mind (Da Capo, Nov.), a memoir by Paula Kamen about her friend Iris Chang, the controversial author of The Rape of Nanking who commited suicide in 2004 at the age of 36. It put me in mind of Ann Patchett's Truth & Beauty: A Friendship, her memoir about her friendship with the late writer Lucy Grealy, By the way, Patchett's new novel, Run (HarperCollins, Oct.), her first since Bel Canto, was one of the big books buzzed at the show.
I filled up a second tote bag, and then a third, and my shoulders and my knees started to ache. Time to go home and call it a day but first one more sweep around the lower-level exhibtion hall. And there I found the most unusual author signing of the show. More than 50 people had lined up to get a copy of Tracy Chevalier's latest novel,
Burning Bright, signed by the author who just happened to be sitting in her London home with her young son peering shyly behind her. The device used in this virtual signing was the
Longpen, a long-distance, real pen and ink autographing device invented by novelist Margaret Atwood.
Since I first saw this device demonstrated at last year's Bookexpo, the technology had definitely improved with clearer video pictures so that author and reader could communicate easily.. It was quite impressive to see a gracious Chevalier inscribe a book to a devoted fan several thousand miles away. What was especially notable was how much time Chevalier spent chatting with each reader, a good five minutes, as opposed to the impersonal assembly-line 30-second in-the-flesh Alice Sebold signing. If I hadn't been so tired and footsore, I would have stood in line for another 30 minutes to get my copy. Now I can just kick myself at my missed opportunity! (One interesting note; Bruce Walsh, LongPen's vice president, sales and marketing, said that a number of larger libraries, including Denver Public, had expressed interest in the $60,000 device and that the Toronto Public Library planned to purchase the device later in the year.)
Posted by Wilda Williams on June 3, 2007 | Comments (2)
