Rick Simonson

Last Day of Summer
September 22, 2007

A Saturday afternoon ... September ... the feeling that I've been to a fall tradeshow, but something is vaguely off-kilter. I'm here in Seattle for one thing. And it's a Saturday afternoon where I'm not staggering out of the gray-blue fluorescent light of a conference hall into some bright flash of longer-shadowed September sun with the feeling that it will be some hours, and some miles, at earliest, before I'm home. So it has been after how many years of attending Pacific Northwest Bookseller Association fall shows - in Eugene, in Spokane (once), and variously in Portland. It's been fourteen years, 1995 since it was up this way, with most years preceding at one point south or another. And always, the ending of it has come on a Saturday, if not Sunday.

This year's fall PNBA was held across Lake Washington from Seattle in Bellevue, not so long ago one of those almost-quaint suburban 'bedroom' communities (it still has a cute, narrow little Main Street), now a booming, skyscraping glass, concrete, and steel metropolis of its own. It's been fourteen years since the show and tell has been up here. For some of us more used to the creaks and squeaks of wood, the texture of bricks and terra cotta, a place like Bellevue can feel farther from home than somewhere like Portland (the Portland we see) 180 miles south. Venture over we did: having the show close to home meant more from our store could go. It appeared this was so, especially with the other larger stores up here. Different groups came different days - the Wednesday seminars, the Thursday and half-day Friday floor exhibits, the breakfasts, lunches, and dinners that went with it. And - gut feeling this is - it felt like the Friday was busier than the second days of such shows can be. Some of it may have been the compressed, early closing time. Some of it also may have been more Seattle presences that I would have known. A good number said they were there only the second day. 

This year I mostly toed a straight line, walking and working the display floor a good part of the two days, which means, in actuality, no straight line at all. Even though it's one good-sized room you can always make out the far end of, and can traverse it in a minute or two, it always seems there are stop to be made, intentional or incidental, along the way. For us, it's everything for working with (and helping steer0 younger colleagues about, helping them see for themselves a bit of the larger pictures, it's dropping off backlist offer orders, saving a few attempts to connect with email or the phone by doing some add-on titles, greeting the regular reps plus those publishers reps that otherwise only see Amazon (they get variety out of it if nothing else), seeing finished copies of some heralded titles (especially the ones reps warn will be out of stock pronto), chatting up people from other stores, Oren from ABA (Len Vlahos always seemed to be sitting with someone at a computer terminal), seeing the familiar or meeting the new people visiting from New York (it seemed light in this regard in general). It can be hard to say what tangibly comes from this but it always feels like something more is gained than is put in - it's a good thing, somewhere along the way something from it will kick in. There are authors there, too, as Carl Lennertz recently pointedly pointed out. People from Elliott Bay who attended the PNA Banquet's 'moveable feast' enjoyed the authors they met that way. Garth Stein was there, learning the HarperCollins lay of the land, most gtaciously. He looked fairly unaffected by the huge advance he just got from Harper for his forthcoming novel next spring, as bookseller-friendly and down to earth as when he was meeting people just to be known as a writer over with the Soho books a few years ago.

It was still early afternoon, but then this show was ending in early afternoon. It seemed time to beat the screech of the tape guns and the rush at the book check-out line, and then the garage. The last tour of the floor was done and over, the car (this time) underway and headed, so it was intended, home, there was still that off-base realization that it was more like ten miles to go180. I was feeling deprived of a little musing time, some countryside, the adventure of a random stop along the way, the deep blue skies and aforementioned bright sun I was seeing as I emerged from the convention center parking garage. South on I-405, there's the juncture with I-90. Go west and I'm over the lake and home, back at the store in fifteen minutes. Go east, and it's a beautiful jaunt over the mountains, rising and descending, more blue sky, the first turning of leaves, some other voice saying 'let fall happen this way, too.' We'll see. Whichever way on the road, autumn it will shortly be.

Posted by Rick Simonson on September 22, 2007 | Comments (0)