NORTHWEST BOOKFEST isn’t really the Great Affirmation of Seattle As Book-Lovers’ Capital of America that its sponsors like to claim.
It’s merely a stop on a North America-wide circuit of consumer-oriented book confabs (as opposed to industry-oriented book confabs, like the annual trade fairs in Chicago and Frankfurt). Some of these confabs are older, bigger, and/or more prestigious than Seattle’s.
But the Seattle show’s organizers can take credit for having started big six years ago and just gotten bigger since. Originally held in a rustic old pier (where the cover image of Loser had been photographed, at one of Nirvana’s last shows), it’s moved, as of last week’s 2000 edition, to Paul Allen’s Stadium Exhibition Center next to Safeco Field.
There, spread over two of the hall’s three huge rooms, what had previously been a boistrous bazaar of literary hucksterism became little more than another exercise in feelgood moderation.
The front hall was only about two-thirds filled with booths and readings stages. A couple more stages, plus some activity areas and another dozen or so sales booths, were even more thinly spread across the cavernous rear hall. The spaciousness prevented the event from generating the kind of critical mass of people, noise, and energy it needs.
Face it: Reading is (and writing especially is) a lone, quiet entertainment. Even audio books are often listened to while one’s stuck alone in a car. A festival celebrating books and reading needs to be a coming-out event, a joyous gathering where people openly share the experiences, ideas, and fantasies they keep to themselves the rest of the year.
My suggestion: Play up the “fest” part of Bookfest. If it’s going to be held in a space built for auto and boat shows, it should adopt some of the showmanship of those events.
Make it a “World of Words Lit-O-Rama.”
I can see it now:
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A Vanna White lookalike letter-turning contest, with separate competitions for women, girls, and cross-dressers.
- An Algonquin Round Table re-creation, with actors portraying those 1920s wits while audience members listen in from other tables in the NYC-hotel bar setting.
- “Literary Concessions,” special foods and beverages tying in to favorite books (madelines, green eggs and ham), language in general (Alpha-Bits), or decadent-writerly fantasies (whiskey, absinthe). (If this special food and drink service contractually has to be arranged through the exhibition hall’s regular concessionaires, let it be done that way.)
- Readings and panel discussions that go beyond the mere hyping of new books. Actors and “local celebrities” (the usual crowd of athletes, musicians, TV newspeople, radio hosts, politicians, etc.) could share passages from their favorite (kid and grownup) authors. Authorities and scholars could discuss the past and future of written/spoken language. Book collectors could show off examples of once-popular genres and formats (pulp magazines, penny dreadfuls, nurse romances, underground comix).
- A book-arts demonstration area, only more diverse than the one Bookfest had in prior years. Besides the paper-making and hand-binding crafts, there could be brief tutorials in page-layout and web design, self-publishing, and agent-getting. There could even be hands-on demonstrations of those much-hyped but seldom-seen “eBook”-type devices (which were notably absent from Bookfest this year).
- More games. Not just the Scrabble mini-tourney but spelling bees, literary-trivia competitions, and add-on-story writing games.
- For the kids, a Harry Potter character costume contest.
- For the adults, a Pillow Book body-paint calligraphy exhibition.
TOMORROW: Here today, gone to Kenmore.
ELSEWHERE:
