Books, Arts & Manners: The Other Convention

This year, as it has every year for the past 33, the American Booksellers’ Association got together to talk things over and decide what books people are going to be reading next year. This annual convention is one of the most under-reported but culturally influential events on the calendar, and this year’s extravaganza brought 17,000 booksellers, publishers, media types, celebrity authors, and artful gate-crashers to Chicago’s massive McCormick Place—one of the few arenas in the nation large enough to accommodate the ABA.

Inside the great hall, publishers vie with one another to create the flashiest (and, in some cases, the tallest or most oddly shaped) booth. Devoutly to be wished, of course, is the coveted status of ad hoc landmark, a whole weekend of 17,000 people all saying, “Harcourt Brace Jovanovich? Just turn right at Avon.” Posters, buttons, stick-ons, playing cards, fuzzy little critters with feet, bookmarks: all bear some promotional tie-in for a book the publisher has come here to move. You could meet Tom Wolfe at the Bantam booth, on hand to sign paperback copies of The Right Stuff, or Stephen King, author of The Shining, or Erica Jong, whose eighteenth century period-piece Fanny is expected to put smiles on the faces of salesmen for New American Library. There were Victor Borge, Judith Krantz (following up the success of Scruples with,

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Linda Stevens

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This year, as it has every year for the past 33, the American Booksellers’ Association got together to talk things over and decide what books people are going to be reading next year. This annual convention is one of the most under-reported but culturally influential events on the calendar, and this year’s extravaganza brought 17,000 booksellers, publishers, media types, celebrity authors, and artful gate-crashers to Chicago’s massive McCormick Place—one of the few arenas in the nation large enough to accommodate the ABA.

Inside the great hall, publishers vie with one another to create the flashiest (and, in some cases, the tallest or most oddly shaped) booth. Devoutly to be wished, of course, is the coveted status of ad hoc landmark, a whole weekend of 17,000 people all saying, “Harcourt Brace Jovanovich? Just turn right at Avon.” Posters, buttons, stick-ons, playing cards, fuzzy little critters with feet, bookmarks: all bear some promotional tie-in for a book the publisher has come here to move. You could meet Tom Wolfe at the Bantam booth, on hand to sign paperback copies of The Right Stuff, or Stephen King, author of The Shining, or Erica Jong, whose eighteenth century period-piece Fanny is expected to put smiles on the faces of salesmen for New American Library. There were Victor Borge, Judith Krantz (following up the success of Scruples with,