A Book Fair Sprouts in Brooklyn

By Charlotte Abbott -- Publishers Weekly, 4/24/2006

In the city that never sleeps, are there enough readers to justify another major book fair? New York City is already host to next week's PEN World Voices Festival as well as the New York Times's Great Read in the Park, the New Yorker Festival and the Harlem Book Fair, not to mention hundreds of author appearances every year. But the organizers of the first annual Brooklyn Book Festival, now set to take place on Saturday, September 16, are determined to reach out to the nearly 2.5 million residents of the city's biggest borough, while celebrating its unique literary history.

"Culture is pumped out in Manhattan, but the creators live in Brooklyn. That's always been true—with Walt Whitman, Richard Wright and John Steinbeck, and now Coleson Whitehead, Jhumpa Lahiri and Paul Auster," said Johnny Temple, the festival council's chair and the publisher of Akashic Books.

Sponsored by borough president Marty Markowitz, with support from the Independence Community Bank Foundation, Washington Mutual Bank and Time Out New York, the fair is aiming for national prominence. Organizers expect at least 100 publishers to exhibit at the free festival in Brooklyn's Borough Hall Plaza, while author events will be held in Borough Hall's newly restored meeting rooms. Although the Brooklyn Public Library and Brooklyn Academy of Music will help with cross-promotion, the festival will likely have to recruit more corporate sponsors to subsidize major publicity, noted Ann Binkley, former organizer of the now-defunct Manhattan event New York Is Book Country.

The festival has already attracted some major authors to its honorary committee, including Lahiri, Russell Simmons, Maurice Sendak, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nicole Krause and Howard Zinn. The organizing council includes Poets and Writers editor Mary Gannon, Council of Literary Magazines head Jeffrey Leffendorp and the Brooklyn Public Library's Jay Kaplan. While acknowledging that much work remains for the organizers, Temple explained, "This is the challenge of our times—to make reading sexy, exciting and smart to new audiences."