New York, you were lovely! Now, we will be digging ourselves out from the permafrost, and reflecting on our time at the book fair. We partnered with Brian Cassidy and despite our cave-like space, we managed to see a ton of foot traffic, as well as some attention from CNN (see below), a representative from China on book arts, and a nice article by Erin Schreiner addressing women in the book trade. It was particularly heartening to see just how much younger this year’s attendees skewed… While the hall remained dominated with older collectors, etc…there were a remarkable number of young, interested, engaged attendees. Even more so on the librarian front. We even had a visit by the remarkable Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson! The future, I think, is looking quite good.

SCROTUS gave us both a good and bad bit at the fair. On the downside, CNN wanted to shoot in the booth…as it was a particularly sexy, interesting collection of material across the booth, but then saw the rather brilliant Billy Childish posters we had front and center. To paraphrase: “Oh, we can’t shoot those, we’d get too much pushback”. Personally, I think that is a sad commentary, but there we are. On the upside, we sold *every* single set we had with us (about 10) and there was no other single thing that amused more people. We had exactly one person grumble about it…and several dozen smile/laugh/commiserate/take pictures/generally enjoy them. The culmination came, during break down, when one of the teamsters, walking by, asked (with an impressive NJ accent) “Ya sell my favorite thing?” “What was that?” “Pissing in the mouth of Donald Trump” (he said, laughing). Great finish to the show.

#nyabaa17 #nyabf17