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I have dreams of attending the Mountain and Plains Independent Booksellers Association FallCon, happening in Denver in early October (including my birthday!) Attending these annual and bi-annual book and publishing trade shows has been one of the great pleasures of my decades in the bookselling biz.
My first visit to a book expo was long before I began bookselling. It was 1988 in Buenos Aires, Argentina. and twice I dropped into the annual Feria del Libro. I remember being blown away by the excitement of nearly 500,000 square feet of books, publishers, authors, even though nearly all of them were in Spanish. I could keep up conversations in Spanish, and work my way through newspapers, but truly reading a full book was beyond me.
Around 2010 is when I first began attending the big annual Book Expo in the United States, held at that time in New York City. The event went back to 1947, when for its first years it was held in Washington DC. It later rotated through other US cities, spent a long period in the 1990s and early 2000s anchored in Chicago. During my years of attendance, it was always in New York City, with the exception of 2016, when it was held in Chicago. Covid shut down the Expo in 2020, and it has never returned, viewed as uneconomical in today’s online era. I miss it, and so do many others. A good overview of the pros and cons of resuming the Book Expo can be found in this Publishers Weekly article from last year.
Publishers Weekly itself has put on a scaled-down event, and the regional American Booksellers Association branches put on smaller expos every spring and fall. I’ve also attended a Winter Institute, a bootcamp for booksellers put on by the American Booksellers Association.
All of these are smaller versions of what Book Expo was, and they do have some of the same excitement. Authors in attendance, book signings, talks and lectures about books and bookselling, publishers touting their new books coming out next season, and of course the Galley Rooms, where publishers offer advance copies of their upcoming books. You can easily come home from an Expo with duffel bags full of not-yet-published books. I know, because I’ve done it many times.
I miss it. I haven’t been to any such book event since before Covid. I’m not sure I’ll be able to make the FallCon in October, but fingers crossed.
Below are some photos from Book Expos past to enjoy.
And now...So what are you reading? What’s on your mind?
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I also write the weekly Nonfiction Views diary on Tuesday evenings, sometimes with a review of a new book, sometimes just with publishing news and a look at the week’s most interesting new nonfiction. I also contribute a comment in one of the two weekly Black Kos diaries, featuring the week’s new books of specific interest to Black and Latino/a readers.
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