A Letter From America #25
The New York Book Fair 2004
From
the Rare Book Review
Spittle flecking his lips, the seemingly berserk man rushed
towards me, eyes rolling, his ample belly struggling to escape through the gap
between his sagging belt and inadequate T-shirt. “What do you think you’re doing?” he cried, “No, no,
no, not there. Not there!” I rolled
up my car window and ignored him. We
had pulled into the loading area of the New York Book Fair, and the Teamsters
were trying to direct us.
Regular as the swallows to Capistrano, we head every April
for the Seventh Regiment Armory on
Park Avenue
for five days in the weird greenish glow of its vast Quonset hut interior.
No one who has experienced its bathrooms (although the cognoscenti know
the secret location of nicer ones) would suspect that rich people with money to
spend would hang out here. But the
Armory is the high school gym of the
Upper East Side
– it may be nasty, but it’s as comfortable as an old shoe, and no one seems
to mind. For exhibitors, you can drive right in the back if you can get past the
Teamsters.
After about twenty
New York
book fairs at the Armory location, with a few antique shows thrown in, I reached
the grim calculation that I’ve spent four months of my life inside its sickly
dome. The odd light, the hum of the
air system, and the detached timeless quality peculiar to all trade shows, makes
it a truly other-worldly experience. As
I sit here on the final day of this year’s fair, it becomes hard to remember
how long I have been here. It was
still winter when I came in, and they tell me it is now spring outside, but I
won’t know until we tear down and move out.
The vagaries of the building aside, promoter Sanford Smith
did a superb job, as usual, in organizing this show. For the first time the Fair added a benefit component, so
that on opening night tickets cost $250, with the money going to The New York
Public Library. While this is
standard procedure for the nicer antique shows, such a tariff was untried at a
book fair, and many were concerned that it would kill the gate. The opposite
seemed to be true; few real buyers begrudged the contribution (although some
were pretty unhappy with NYPL’s refusal to mail out the tickets, resulting in
a crush at the pick-up window) and if anything it made it easier to show books
to actual buyers.
The Duke of Wellington said that the history of a battle was like the history of
the ball; each person was so concentrated on what they were doing that they
could have no idea of the larger story. The same is true of a book fair on the
scale of
New York
.
There are so many good books, so many exhibitors, and so many customers, that it
is hard to move beyond one’s own impressions. I am a reasonably comprehensive
comber of fairs, and my personal areas of expertise allow me to exclude the
large modern literature world from my perusal, but I was still seeing booths for
the first time on Sunday afternoon. By the third day, I was running into some
determined customers who had been there since Thursday night, wandering the
aisles with legal pads of notes and dazed expressions on their faces. As with
battles and balls, it is important to keep moving, make decisions quickly,
maintain a lively sense of self-preservation, and trust to luck. Otherwise you
never make it out the other end.
The general buzz, though, was that it was a very successful fair for most of the
trade. The 2003 event was not nearly as chipper, coming at the beginning of the
Iraq
war and the nadir of the stock market. This year things seemed to be much
better; the aisles stayed full even on the first really spring-like weekend in
New York, there were buyers to the end (I made two sales in the last hour, a
point when most book fairs have a fork stuck in them) and I never once saw that
sure indicator that a book fair is done for, a baby stroller in the aisle. The
spectacular prices paid at the Neville sale two days before the show opened were
much discussed and served to make virtually everything look cheap in comparison.
And for any non-book person dragged into the fair, there was the giant chair in
the James Cummins booth. It was so inviting I had to sit down and read a book.
– William S. Reese
