Playback of this video requires the latest Flash Plugin.
Please download the plugin.
Please activate javascript for reliable plugin detection.
Older browsers, also IE/Mac, are not supported. Please upgrade to a standards-compliant browser.
MBP @ BEA
June 5, 2009
Once a year the American publishing industry gets together, along with a healthy contingent of bookish folks from around the world, and puts on Book Expo America. BEA, as it’s known to attendees, is part business meeting, part carnival and part swag hunt. Everything from robotic book lights (emblazoned with whichever printer is using them to vie for business) to casebound editions of Helmut Newton’s photographs are up for grabs, as well as all manner of multicolored, hipster-friendly badges, buttons and stickers. Corporate suits, small town librarians, grasping snuck-in locals and scrappy independents all mingle for three days, swapping business cards and trading favors while sipping $3 coffees and awaiting a chance to get in on the cocktail party three booths down. It’s typical convention fare—for book geeks.
MBP ensconced itself in the action bearing shiny things and, of course, books. Free copies of Going Postal autographed by Martha Cooper were available, as well as first glimpses of the soon to be released Truckers, not to mention all the other books we’ve shared with the world. To make a home for them and ourselves, we enlisted the help of IKEA shelving and the King of Beers. And, like the model citizens we are, we shared freely.
This being the first BEA for yourstruly, I was eager to snag as many tchotchkes as I could, so I spent a good deal of time nicely inquiring about this or that bauble and playing whichever part would get it into my pocket. I was sure to wear my cargo pants.
Booth attendants seem to be generally open to exchanges on the sly, probably because schlepping boxes of books you came with home is not something anyone wants to do, especially after an exhausting weekend. Most booths would gladly swap, for instance, Soviet Posters for Notations 21 or the latest Cabinet for a copy of Protest Graffiti Mexico. So I left with full pockets and a pile of books. Now my only problem is deciding how many New York Review of Books Classics buttons is too many to pin on a satchel.
