I have been  invited to a BOOK FAIR.  So this past two weeks I have been getting ready.  I have searched online for “Book Fairs and Book Festivals”. Since I am such a bibliophile you would think that I would have been to a book fair at least once in my life. The closest thing to a Book Fair that I have attended was an Antiquarian Book sale in Sacramento California. It was real interesting. There were tables with thousands of dollars of rare books. There were booths that only sold Science Fiction and Adventure books and one guy sold “Ephemera”. My computer dictionary defines ephemera as :

items of collectible memorabilia, typically written or printed

ones, that were originally expected to have only short-term

  usefulness or popularity.

The gentleman in Sacramento had pamphlets or paper advertisements from political parties, churches, carnivals, whack-o’s of every description. Cheap printings offering opinions on U.F.O.’s communism, marijuana, medical cures. I spent a lot of time looking. The prices were outrageous.

So that antiquarian sale is what I am using in my mind as a reminder of what a Book Fair may actually be like. The instructions I received from the organizers of the Book Fair say that I will share a table with another person. That translates into an area, three foot by 30 inches. They will provide a chair. So, to simplify things I have done two 8 x17 posters that give people walking by a little bit of an idea about the contents of the book. 

My Internet search for other Book Fairs turned up some amazing information.  Iowa City, Denver Colorado, Paris France, even found the UFO convention in Eureka Springs Arkansas. So I need to look at the possibilities and potentialities, and make some decisions based on potential sales, not on where I would like to go for a little vacation.

Book Fairs sound like a new adventure. Hope they are not as boring as wholesale trade fairs.