by Robert Gray
Fresh Eyes: A Bookseller's Journal
Yesterday, voice was on my mind, so today, as I read my way through the dense prose that is BEA, the natural transition should have been to characters, followed, logically, by plot tomorrow.
My original plan was to observe the human parade and pluck out all of the characters who symbolize this show for anyone who has ever stood for a moment in the aisles and watched the parade go by.
Plans change.
I'm a cynic and a fatalist at heart, but I came out of this second day tired (two hours of sleep last night), aching, and, to my surprise, energized and hopeful. It's a trick BEA plays on me every year.
The reason for this strange occurrence was that my conversations today led me away from characters (too easy to spot here anyway) to the concept of character itself.
I spoke again and again to people who love books and do everything they can, within the enormous range of possibilities and limitations the industry affords us, to find, produce, and sell good books.
Bad books, too, but that's another subject.
So, the show was intense again today, and the booths of the major publishers were clogged with people either passing through at glacial speed or standing in long lines for author autographs. Even the aisles that I would generally expect to be less crowded seemed to have steady traffic.
But this is not a traffic report. It's also no longer about characters, though they were all here, in excess and density, for the viewing audience.
I wandered the aisles a lot today, looking, as always, for the unexpected book, but I seemed to spend most of my time meeting with editors, either by appointment or circumstance. Sometimes we spoke for a few minutes, but often the conversation lasted an hour or more.
Watching the human rapids flow by us from the relative safety of a booth, we talked about books -- new books, old books, successful books and that other kind. Some of the editors were with large publishing houses, some with small, but all, it occurred to me as the day wound down, shared one precious thing in common: a love of reading and good books.
I'm not nearly as starry-eyed as that sounds. This can be an ugly business. No revelations there. At BEA, however, we try to pretend for a few days that it isn't. And, for the most part, we succeed.
Today, for a few hours, I thought it was a pretty damned good business.
However convoluted the story line of the publishing industry in America may be at times, I was reminded early and often that it still has a great cast of characters. Most of them are doing the best work they can. Most of them wish they could do more. And maybe, I keep hoping, they/we can in small ways leading to big ways. It is about character, and character was what, shockingly, I kept seeing today in the people I met.
At least that's what I think on day two of BEA. This place, this show messes with my mind. It makes me...optimistic.
Maybe I just need more sleep.