The strangest part was being accosted by a six-foot white rabbit as I waited for my 3.30 appointment. Has someone done a rework of Harvey? I asked myself, since everyone around me looked as bemused as I felt. The rabbit itself maintained a diplomatic silence and went right on handing out flyers.
Then there was the drumming. That began at about 5pm, and I think it was connected to the troupe of glamorous, and teeth-clenchingly thin, girls in red satin who sashayed up and down the aisles flinging out leaflets about Bollywood.
Yes, folks, the London Book Fair is upon us once more. It began on Monday and runs till close of play today, with all the high-profile deals and signings, look-at-me displays and razzmatazz I’ve learned to expect.
For the likes of me it’s mainly a way of touching base with people who for most of the year are names at the top of an e-mail. The personal touch still counts for something, and sitting at a computer all day most days does have a way of making you crave human contact. Not that I lead a completely solitary life, you understand; but sometimes it’s good to remember that those electronic addresses are real people with faces and voices.
But the London Book Fair is more than a meeting place and a talking shop. It’s an experience.
Where else can you see the Bookspresso machine in action? Yeah, OK, a dozen places in north America if you know where to look, and somewhere in Egypt and Australia as well, but here in good old Blighty it exists in one bookshop. And not even there until June. But it was at the London Book Fair. I didn’t actually see it produce a book, though I expect I could have if I hadn’t been rushing to another appointment. But I did get to handle one it made earlier – and whaddyaknow, folks, it looked just like a real book. Which, I suppose, is pretty much the whole point.
I didn’t get to see an Amazon Kindle or a Sony e-reader first hand, though e-books were very much on the agenda, not to mention everyone’s lips. Five out of the six people I had meetings with brought the subject up, with varying degrees of enthusiasm and scepticism. I have an awful feeling it’s a subject I’ll have to address at some point in the fairly near future, laying aside my natural aversion to all things technological, if only to make sure I stay up to date on the copyright situation. Not that that will prevent my authors and me being ripped off by cyber-cleverclogses who know how to lift the files from wherever they’re stored without benefit of credit card.
And on the subject of being ripped off: am I alone in wondering how a cheese salad sandwich can cost £4.75 inside the exhibition hall when an almost identical sandwich is £2.30 in a shop a few minutes walk away? Or a bottle of water can cost half as much again as at the newsstand outside the Underground station? Maybe no one else notices; even in these days of crunched credit and whatever the opposite of booming is when applied to economies, big publishing companies (and printers and distributors and wholesalers agents and Uncle Tom Cobbleigh and the rest of the extravaganza which makes up the Fair) can still afford expense accounts or they wouldn’t be there. Chance would be a fine thing. For us the train fare’s a stretch.
But I’m not complaining. Well, not much. I didn’t buy an overpriced sandwich anyway. I did talk to some people, visit a few stands, pick up a brochure or two. I didn’t cut any major six figure rights deals. But I had the experience.
