859 exhibitor booths, all having to do with books or other printed materials, in a conference hall the size of several football fields makes for a delirious day of giddy joy in a bookworm of my caliber. It actually turned out to be a good thing that the majority of the books were in Swedish because I can’t even imagine what I would have spent at a book fair where all the books were ENGLISH! And as it was I came home with 22 books, including 6 each for the kids (plus 3 original Star Wars film-adaptation comic books for Karin’s Christmas present!).
The kids made out like bandits, with a Halloween craft/fun book each, The Borrowers, Flat Stanley, Roald Dahl’s The Witches, among others, plus I found a book about the spacecraft and vehicles of Star Wars for Karin and a HUGE map board book for Martin that is nearly as tall as he is.
I found 2 new Philip Pullman New Cut Gang stories, Diana Gabaldon’s A Breath of Snow & Ashes finally in paperback, Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, 2 new Jeanette Winterson’s, and 3 fantasy novels that look really promising: Exodus by Julie Bertagna, The Goose Girl by Shannon Hale, and The Looking Glass Wars by Frank Beddar.
O! So many books to pick up and caress, with the slick glossy feel of them and the crispness of the pages and the smell of paper and ink wafting everywhere. It was really crowded, being Saturday; the place was FULL of publishing people and like-minded bookworms, walking slowly through the aisles, jostling each other, standing motionless in front of the display you most wanted to reach or drifting jellyfish-like past the shelves and shelves and shelves of books.
Most of the booths were publishing companies, but also included several bookstores including The Uppsala English Bookstore, The English Shop, The Science Fiction bookstore; and a handful of paper companies selling posters, music, journals, scrapbooks, calendars, notecards, bookmarks, you name it. There were bookbinders, museums, press companies for every country and language imaginable. Most of the bigger booths had a schedule of speakers IN the booth during the entire day, along with book signings. You had to pay quite a bit extra for the real seminars to listen to the featured authors and keynotes, but there were plenty of options on the floor. I was devastated to discover later in the afternoon that Sven Nordqvist, who writes and illustrates the Pettsson & Findus books had been there at 10:30 signing books, which was about the time we arrived in the morning…at the other end of the massive hall. Wah!
We ate lunch at noon and then raced back out onto the floor to continue our perusal/frenzy/delirium until we fetched up around mid-afternoon: hot, sweaty, exhausted and broke. The four of us had filled our backpacks and we all had 2 or more extra bags dangling from our twisted wrists. We’d been all over the floor twice at the least and felt we’d really covered it and bought everything we had really been coveting. We left Gothenburg at 4, zooming up the ramp onto the highway, heading south along the coast with the late sun shining in our eyes and our minds not on the road, not on the week ahead, not on the things we needed to do, not on our families, but on the treasures calling from the back of the car: Read me! Read me! No, read me!
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Silly Dilly Whirly Sealy Birthday Wishes to sealwhiskers!