…or as I call it, “The World-O-Words LiteRama,” set up shop last weekend at one of Sand Point’s ex-naval air hangars (not, as I’d previously said here, the same hangar used for the Friends of the Library book sales).
News accounts said attendance was back up from last year’s event at the bland-modern Stadium Exhibition Center, and quoted several attendees as preferring the “funky old” atmosphere of the huge drafty structure originally built to house symbols of military power. Some of these quoted attendees said Bookfest belongs somewhere other than a standard sales-show hall, since books, after all, weren’t just another business.
Books, of course, have been treated for some time as just another business, by the intellectual-property oligopolists who run that business. And also by ambitious entrepreneurs selling specific info to niche markets; such as Heather & Co., the publisher of Eat Without Fear: Help for Irritable Bowel Syndrome.
The relative remoteness of the Sand Point site, which doesn’t have direct bus service from downtown Seattle, did as much as the building’s “funkiness” to help the event’s goers believe themselves to be so darned special in that PBS-precious middlebrow way. Even the weather played its part, providing perfect tweed-sweater temperatures and waterfront grayout sightlines.
Book-biz realities, as I’ve monotonously said every year around Bookfest time, are a little different. There’s no separate subculture of book readers, just as there’s no separate subculture of CD listeners. There are now as many mega bookstores in Seattle as there are mega record stores.
There are subcultures (or niches) within the larger book biz. “Serious” literature is but one of those niches. What I like about Bookfest is the way it crowds so many of these niches into one room–the cookbook people, the travelogue people, the coffee-table-book people, the children’s-chapter-book people, the antiquarian-book people, the nature-poetry people, the self-help people, the mystery people, the sci-fi people, and at least some aspects of the serious-lit people.
(Still underrepresented at Bookfest: Comics, zines, romances, erotica, translated lit, and PoMo/experimental lit.)
And oh yeah–there’s another, locally quite popular, genre of “writing,” the tattoo. This new U-District parlor’s awning sign could easily represent not only what customers oughta seek in a tattoo parlor, but what some government/business leaders leaders seek for our local civic society.
