Boston Book Fair

One of the best weekends for books in New England is done for another year. Both the ABAA’s Boston Book Fair and the Boston Book and Ephemera Show happen the same weekend and there just isn’t a better weekend to visit Boston if you love books.
We were at the Radison show (two more years before we will be eligible for ABAA membership) and it was a great event. The promoter does a really nice job with the show, we have a great location (same as last year), right by the loading doors…very convenient. Best of all we had extremely good sales and even better feedback from other vendors and from clients/clients to be. Actually, best of all was probably that I had several people who went out of their way to say that they had been hoping we would be showing there…it is *really* nice to know that people are anticipating your attendance…yippie.

We also had a great time shopping both the show we were at and the ABAA event at the Hynes center. It is incredible to have so many exceptional items in one place. It is also fun to have such a concentration of bookishly obsessed humans in one place.

Pop!Tech

Well, another Pop!Tech has come and gone. P!T is one of the great “brain candy” conferences…loosely focused on the intersection of technology and society. Great speakers, great ideas…really a remarkable way to spend a few days and a great way to get inspired for another year about what is and will be. I have been involved in it for years now and am personally committed to it as it was there, four years ago, that I met my wife. My best (wo)man was the woman Suzanne was talking to at P!T when I interrupted them (it was my seeking her out to apologize that led to…well…marriage).

It is a widely dysfunctional organization…which is part of its charm. Too many brilliant, driven and passionate people in one place. Watching our executive director “manage” the group always makes me think of cat herding. The beauty of the organization is, that despite the dysfunction (and/or malfunction), we manage to put on one exceptional conference after another. There are not many conferences where you have the leaders of major tech companies, preeminent scholars, librarians and high school students (and everything in between) together and exploring what it means to be human in, if you will, the digital age. Just wonderful.

Collection Development and Collection Acquisition

I genuinely love what I do. Most of my time is spent working on collection development projects, working with emerging/evolving collectors to assist in the design and growth of their collections. On the other side, I try, as much as possible, to only take in entire collections/libraries. The result, in either case, is that I get to immerse myself in collections that have a theme, a life of their own. An insular book is an island unto itself, a collection give you a the depth and breadth to explore and examine an entire genre. Almost any area becomes engaging and intriguing in volume.

As an example, I have never really been a car guy and books on cars have never had much appeal. However, I recently catalogued 80 or so volumes, mostly on Ferraris and Bugattis. In the course of this I must admit that I have developed a great appreciation for fine automobiles and for some exceptional publishing houses that I never knew existed that cater to the market (FMR is a great example, their book, Divina Bugatti is a truly lovely item). You can not catalog 50-200 volumes in a given area without becoming quite immersed in the nature of the subject…far too much fun.

Great things from Great Barrington

We packed up from Northhampton and drove down (or over) to Great Barrington where a new client had arrange for a lovely bed and breakfast (note to self, find more clients who are willing to put you up in nice places when you visit with them). We checked in and then rushed over to meet with him at a very nice restaurant (absolutely amazing lemon grass and ginger soup with dumplings). He is an exceptionally talented illustrator and cut his professional teeth, as it were, at the National Lampoon in the late 1960s and early ‘70s…that is, the golden age (this was also the period that P.J. O’Rourke was writing there, etc).

We spent much of Sunday going through his archives for books and ephemera related to his time at Lampoon, his books and his work in films, etc. I have not has so much fun since I got married. We kept pulling out one amazing, wonderful and/or bizarre piece after another…some great books (he did this great series of “You Can Build…” books…paper modeling) and some really amazing art pieces. Shown here is one of the three “faux stained glass” pieces done for the Lampoon’s religion issue (circa 1967). The piece was on “Saints who should have been,” this being Saint Onan. It is so good…and so wrong at the same time.

I have only just started to really catalog the collection, there is so much and it is such fun, amazing stuff. I can’t wait to see what I find next. Thus far I have found several unique Grateful Dead items (as well as some other major, late ‘60s bands), an amazing set of “pens as spaceships” that were done to support an article by O’Rourke and a stack of first printings of pretty much everything R. Crumb ever published. Wow.

Northampton Book Fair

What a great weekend. We packed the Jeep the night before and left early on Friday (setup day), had a nice drive during one of the best weekend for leafpeeping up into the Berkshires and had the booth completely set up by evening. This is always nice as it allows for shopping and chatting during the “morning setup” the day of the show.

We then checked into our wildly seedy motel. The door “locked” with a repaired plate, but would not “catch” at the knob as it had clearly been kicked in at some point. One of the beds boxsprings was split at the edge seam and it had that nice “make certain you wear slippers” feel to it. To be fair, it was clean, extremely cheap and the roof did not leak. The moral of the story is, when you know you are attending a relatively well known/attended show, during leaf season, in the Berkshires, it is wise to secure a hotel room more than a week or so before the event *sigh*.

The fair was great. We had some very nice sales and made some even better buys for clients. We really look at our fairs as marketing/brand building exercises…and are thus pleased when we just break even on the show itself. That said, it is far nicer when you break even for a given show and the next show or two. At least as importantly (actually, more so), we meet some great dealers and private collectors and received some wonderful compliments about our booth, the ad in Fine Books and how well good our book descriptions are…all very nice and ego-sating.

Thanks to all who visited us and said nice things…double thanks to those who bought from us. It was really a wonderful weekend…Sunday was exceptional, too…see the next post for why.