Harvard Square Book Festival Celebrates Its 5th Year
by Judith Rosen -- Publishers Weekly, 6/14/1999
The Booksellers of Harvard Square (Cambridge, Mass.), a collaborative of seven new, used, foreign and rare bookstores, held their Fifth Annual Harvard Square Book Festival, May 11-16 at various venues in the Square. All proceeds from the festival will be donated to Cambridge School Volunteers, a nonprofit organization that tutors children in grades K-12 in the Cambridge public schools.
In a departure from previous years, there was a weeklong series of author readings, panels and literary breakfasts, but no outdoor book fair, which had previously drawn as many as 25,000 people. BHS president Carole Horne, general manager of Harvard Book Store, commented, "With New England's iffy May weather, we decided to concentrate on events and forgo the fair this year."
Despite the resulting decrease in attendance, organizers were pleased overall with the '99 festival. Festival director Heidi Brown said she was "very satisfied. One of the things I wanted to do was broaden the appeal," she added, pointing to the success of the cartoon panel featuring Ben Katchor and Stan Mack.
The festival opened with a surprise appearance by Salman Rushdie, his last stop on his U.S. tour for The Ground Beneath Her Feet (Holt). Almost 600 people waited in long lines to be frisked and passed through metal detectors to hear him read. Security was significantly more lax at the popular dialogue on race with Kwame Anthony Appiah, Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Cornel West, which drew more than 275 people. Other well-attended events featured bestselling novelist David Guterson, author of East of the Mountains (Harcourt); NPR's Talk of the Nation host Ray Suarez, author of The Old Neighborhood (Free Press), and fisherman Linda Greenlaw, author of The Hungry Ocean (Hyperion).
The profits from the '99 festival are still being tallied, but according to BHS treasurer Jerry Murphy, president of the Coop, "We will be able to donate at least as much money as last year to Cambridge School Volunteers."
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