Baltimore Show News and Update

Well, we are done with Day 2 of our 4 day. The drive down was smooth and fun. Listened to Snow Crash (which I have read and/or listened to far too often). We spent a night in Annapolis at my in-laws', which was great as it made it very easy to get into Baltimore nice an early on set up Tuesday.

Set-up was interesting. We were able to get in quickly and were setting up by around 930 or so in the morning. Sadly, I finished about nine hours. Really quite pathetic. We did take our time and a fair bit of chatting. The booth looks pretty great...which is nice given it is a four day show. My feet were already hurting (wearing Tevas) by the end of the day.

On the plus side, our neighbors across the isle are these wildly great men from Paris. I set up an overly complex booth that takes a long time to set up...but looks nice at the end. These guys make it appear that I pull things out and put the in piles. They have built, effectively, a formal estate greeting room. The picture does not do them justice, but I hope gives a good sense. They moved in 15 foot oak panel walls and *huge* gas lite lanterns...FOUR of them (they sold in the first 10 minutes...for $32K each). If you are going to spend four days looking across the aisle at someone/something...well, suffice it to say that they have set a bar I do not expect to be met anytime in the near future.

Traffic has been really quite high. Lots of people in the aisles, lots in the booth. We have a great location...one we will try keep going forward (assuming they keep the layout as it is). Sales have been really sold, as has been the buying. Right now, I think we are about status quo...bringing home new stuff in near equal amount to what we have sold (though, to be fair, most of what we have purchased will go out in the next two weeks to clients).

The small John Waters shine has been getting a great deal of attention. There are some fun things and some dealers have added additional material to it. Very fun.

We have had outstanding feedback from people. Some very nice comments about the booth...which we always like to hear. Better still, however, is the number of people who have said how much they enjoy our ads in Fine Books and several who specifically said they were "so pleased we were sponsoring the Collegiate Collecting Competition. We also had a number of people who said they either heard the interview on the local NPR station and/or read the interview in the Balt. Examiner. Just a great deal of very positive feedback.

My feet are destroyed. I am all but paralyzed. I have two days to go.