THE BOOK FAIRS

Tom: Let's talk about the book fairs. You used to run book fairs, didn't you?

Gary: I still do. I still run the New Jersey Book Fair in January, and of course I run the Vermont Summer Book Fair -- that is, the association runs it and I do the promotion and the setup. I have co-promoted some other book fairs in New York and other venues, and I thought I wanted to get out of it, but it's kind of like the Mafia -- hard to get out of. So I'm confronted with the idea of maybe expanding to a couple more areas.

T: You mean, more book fairs?

G: Yes. Glad I said that before Karen got here.

T: Now when did you first do a book fair?

G: I do so many shows, probably too many, forty a year is about average. And I've done these shows under the aegis of so many different promoters, I have a really good sense of the promotional style of various people. I thought this would be something I'd like to do. So I said what I'll do is, incorporate the style of certain promoters I admire, emulate their ways, and avoid the ways of certain other promoters, that I found disturbing. Since I am a dealer first and foremost, I should be able to anticipate a dealer's needs and desires. The first time we got involved in this was in Washington, D.C. There was an ABAA fair in Washington. And Bill Hutchison and myself and Charley Lloyd and Bernadette Bradley decided to rent a hotel suite near where the ABAA show was, and put our books on display there. Many people have done this, in New York for instance, close to the ABAA show. They'll have a private trunk show in a hotel room.

Then we said well maybe we can find a small ballroom and we can have another half dozen people involved. We ended up renting an entire college gym. It became the Washington Antiquarian Book Fair. We rented space from Mount Vernon College which is near American University, in a great part of town. We sold out the first year.

T: So that's ten years ago?

G: Yes. Fifty dealers. It was a very successful show. The ABAA show was never held in that venue again and it has been years since there was a DC ABAA show.

The next year we expanded it and we moved it to The University of Maryland at Shady Grove. We went up to 95 dealers. Again it was successful, but we could never get the venue again, and the ABAA dropped their show, so we essentially dropped out.

T: So your show was going on simultaneous with the ABAA show?

G: Yes, it was a shadow show. It's a concept that I first heard about it at the Heart of Country National Antiques Show in Nashville. There would be all these shows around Heart of Country, trunk shows and tailgaters.

The concept of running a shadow show around the ABAA show has worked for Bernice Bornstein in Boston, who held her first show in a parking garage. It was a horrific venue, but we all did great there. Although the show has been in a hotel for several years and is moving to the Plaza Castle this year, we still seem to refer to the Boston show as "the garage show". It was actually in a parking garage, and your space was set up on the lower level. The place was like a superfund sight, you couldn't breath, the lighting was terrible. You had oil splotches on the floor. It was terrible but it was fabulous. There were port-a-johns set up there, and the highlight of the show would be when the port-a-john truck came through to clean out the toilets. What a venue! But people came and bought books in spite of the venue.

T: I gather from the way people talk that the internet has affected these shows.

G: Of course. There doesn't seem to be the urgency to go to a show anymore, just as there's no urgency to go to the bookshop. Why go to a bookshop when you can go online and search for the books that you're looking for? Why go to Boston, fight the traffic, pay to park, get physically tired, when you can sit home in front of your computer?

Ah, but there's an answer to that. Using a computer, you will never think about the book that will captivate you, because you don't know it exists yet. Until you get into the shop and into the show and into those booths and start looking at those real books, you'll never discover the great thing -- because you don't know it exists.

T: Right. Like walking in here immediately I spotted a lot of books I never saw before. And I get excited holding these books that were completely unknown to me.

G: Right. You'd have to go through everybody's internet stock and download it record by record to see what's out there...and you'd have no visuals in most cases.

T: On the other hand, there have always been book catalogs.

G: There have been book catalogs. But shows are exciting because booksellers go to shows with fresh material, things they just bought. New stuff, interesting stuff is on display. Plus you get to see an assemblage of all these personalities, all these crazy quirky bookies who have no right to be in business. Most of them are terrible business people, but they love the book business for some reason. They show up with all this extraordinary material. To stop going to shows is crazy.

T: The last Burlington show -- not the one that was snowed out -- I talked to a lady who said she had been doing shows for twenty years and now she couldn't make a living at it. She was practically crying. I am wondering whether a lot of people are having that experience?

G: Sure. I think that the book business used to be easier. If something is easy, you don't really have to make an effort at it. It kind of falls into place for you. Even when the book business was easier, there were people who were more successful than others, because they worked harder at it.

T: Well, knowledge is a big part of it.

G: Knowledge was power, and still is power. Knowledge has been exploded by the internet. But I'm not so sure whether it's knowledge that has been exploded or just disjointed facts. In other words, you can google something and you can come up with some disjointed facts that may make that book more understandable to you, but that's not the same as knowledge where over the years you've learned certain things that make the attributes of that book self-evident to you. There's a big difference there.

Traditionally, booksellers all over the country had arcane knowledge about local material, or the material of a particular author or organization, or knowledge about bindings, printers, publishers and whatever. As they accumulated this knowledge, they were able to make more money. They knew what they were buying and they knew where to go with it.

T: So how many fairs a year do you do?

G: Between antique shows and book fairs, never less than 35 and as many as 45.

T: You do antique shows as well?

G: Yes.

T: The books you take to the fairs, do you keep them packed all the time?

G: No. Hence the fact that you get fresh stuff for every show.

T: And you buy at the shows as well.

G: I do.

T: What's the farthest you have traveled to a show.

G: I do San Francisco every year.

T: I thought every other year it was in Los Angeles.

G: Yes, but we do the off-year San Francisco show too.

T: Do you think book fairs are going to expand or stay the same?

G: There is a move within the ABAA to move to a higher end model, which I don't agree with. But there are a number of dealers in the ABAA who would feel very comfortable paying $10,000 for their booth, and having a smaller show. And display books in the multi-thousand dollar range.

T: That would be very exclusive.

G: Yes, it would. Currently the ABAA booth is $5,000 and change.

T: They'll probably have to do a background check to let you in as a customer!

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