If you like books, if you really like books — if
you are the kind of person whose books overrun your house, whose book
budget exceeds your food budget, the kind of person who can spend an
afternoon or the whole weekend in a bookstore, the BookExpo America convention is something
like paradise . . . well, except that large mascot-type animals are always
walking around, and a disproportionate number seem to be Clifford the Big
Red Dog imitators. I hear tales this year about the flying monkeys from the
Wizard of Oz, but don’t actually see them, or know what they are
promoting. The BEA, formerly known as the American Booksellers
Association convention, showcases publishers’ wares for the following
seasons. At the end of May, booksellers, librarians, and bibliophiles come
from afar to the city hosting the BEA — this year, Washington, D.C. I
don’t know whether it’s a coincidence, but it seems to me that
political books are big this year. On the two floors of the Washington Convention Center,
publishers vie to get a buzz going about their books. To get you to come to their booths, people give away
tote bags, T-shirts, pens, chocolates, and, later in the day, martinis,
which perhaps explains the flying-monkey sightings. I always head for the small presses’ displays
first. One newer small press I like is Melville House Publishing, whose
politics lean to the left, but which nevertheless has a good line of
fiction. (This is actually a rare combination.) I pick up a short essay
titled “Social Security and the Golden Age: An Essay on the New
American Demographic,” by former U.S. Sen. George McGovern, and a
paperback, Articles of Impeachment Against
George W. Bush, authored by the Center for
Constitutional Rights. I was on the floor for a total of five hours, which
isn’t long enough to see everything. There are great books I missed,
and I heard about some of them coming home on the train from other people
who were there longer than me. But of the books I chose to carry home with
me, I will give you recommendations on two. A Perfect Mess by
Eric Abrahamson and David H. Freedman (Little, Brown, 304 pages, $25.99, to
be released Jan. 3) is something of an antithesis to all those books on
getting rid of clutter. It has two subtitles: “The Hidden Benefits of
Disorder” and “How crammed closets, cluttered offices, and
on-the-fly planning make the world a better place.” In other words,
the title is a little cluttered, but it’s hard not to love a book
that begins with this quote from Albert Einstein: “If a cluttered
desk is a sign of a cluttered mind, of what, then, is an empty desk?”
Here’s the other book I predict you’ll be
hearing about in Springfield: Mary, a historical novel by Janis Cooke Newman (MacAdam
Cage, 650 pages, $26, to be released Sept. 12). It’s not about Mary
Magdalene, as many of the books seemed to be this year, but about Mary Todd
Lincoln. The epigraph for this book is “Mrs. Mary Lincoln admitted
today — from Chicago — Age 56 — Widow of Ex-President
Lincoln — declared insane by the Cook County Court May 19 —
1875.” The voice in the book is very similar to the PBS Mary Lincoln
voice, describing her life in the asylum. It was the book, on the convention floor, getting the
buzz.
This article appears in Jun 15-21, 2006.
