More Musings on the Book Fair

Well, it looks like all that running around I did came with a price tag. Woke up Tuesday to a head cold, but by Thursday I was back to (sort of) normal. I wish I could tell you I accomplished a zillion things this week, but I’m afraid I did not. My activities since Monday are as follows: wrote the blog about the book fair; read Reading Jackie about Jackie Kennedy’s work as an editor; went to lunch with Cheryl; wrapped orders every day; cleaned my house, most especially the kitchen floor which after a weekend of rain and little people reappeared under layers of dirt, orange juice, and blackberry jelly; had my friend Mary Lynn from Dayton over for breakfast and a peak at the royal wedding this morning (did NOT love the dress, but the bride’s adorable); listed some books; read a backlog of newspapers; did all the New York Times crossword puzzles I missed; talked to Eric who is at a show in Maryland; and conducted a daily round or two of the Great Book Treasure Hunt.

The latter is a fun, if somewhat stressful, game that occurs when you fail to unpack in a prompt manner after a book fair. I believe I mentioned that books become exceedingly popular when they are in boxes. Well, the good/bad news is that they stay that way even after the sale is over if you don’t release them from captivity. This year we unboxed them because Eric needed the wooden boxes for the show he’s at now, but all we did was stack the books in a large block in his office. Last year I put them away immediately, but with the cold and the other stuff it never happened, hence all the frantic rummaging I've been doing all week.  \I did make a considerable dent in it this afternoon, so three quarters of the books are reshelved now, but some still await me as you can see from the above photo. On the bright side I did  sell a vintage Akron pottery catalog to someone from the book fair. He bought a catalog at the fair and I mentioned I had the pottery one and, sure enough, he inquired about it yesterday and we struck a deal this morning. How cool is THAT? Last year my after fair activity was confined to a large outlay of money when we bought a book collection from a fair-goer. This year only one person asked if we buy books and so far we haven't had a follow-up call from her.

The events of the week -- the cold especially --  gave me both time and perspective to think about the fair some more, so a few additional things occurred to me. Last year we benefited greatly from the ability to process credit cards. In several instances we made sales after the buyers had run out of cash and saw something they wanted. This year, however, we had exactly ONE credit card sale – the rest were cash and checks. I knew credit card usage was down, but Eric was the one checking people out so I had no idea that the number of cc transactions had fallen off that dramatically. Why this would be I don’t know – perhaps the economy and worries about incurring debt. The other thing that occurred to me is something Darwin told me a couple weeks ago about the Ann Arbor Antiques Show. He said that this year attendance soared, but the buyers were not really collectors. They knew nothing about antiques, asked astounding questions, paled at the prices, and ended up being more like museum goers. As mentioned previously, we saw that same phenomenon. Again, I’m not sure what this means in the big picture, but I hadn’t immediately made the correlation between antiques and books.

A third difference this year was dealer sales. Last year we sold only to consumers. This year we walked away from our booth before the sale started on the first day and returned to find a children’s book with a dealer’s business card in it on our check-out table. I also sold three journals to the guy set up next to us and a scientific ephemera item to a third dealer. There may have been more, but even if not, those three sales represented yet another surprising difference. What's interesting is that a long time dealer who was at the show, but not as an exhibitor,  remarked that he couldn't buy inventory at the fair anymore because there was no margin for profit. I agreed, as I used to try buying stock at this fair even before I was an exhibitor and succeeded only once in doing so. Clearly, my prices allowed dealers room for profit which struck me as interesting given how much price resistance we experienced this year.

But of course we’ve only exhibited twice, so it may be premature to make assumptions about any of it based on so little experience. Perhaps every year is its own year, each one arriving and departing with its own eccentricities. Perhaps the fact that I sold a lot of paper this year means no more or less than the fact that I sold a lot of paper this year. Maybe next year I will bring a bushel of it and haul a bushel home again. Last year my hot category was technical books. This year I didn’t sell a one.

Go figure.