Book marks
The authors turn out in dozens for the Convention of the American Booksellers' Association, although the ABA made it as hard as possible by holding the exhibition on the second floor of the Hilton, and having the Press Room on the fifth, and then neglecting to ensure that the lifts (beg pardon, elevators) could stop at the second floor. Bookbuyer, prepared to undergo exceptional hardships in his pursuit of the story, trudged down to the ground floor as many times as his feet would carry him, and found out some interesting things on the way. For instance, physicist and science-fiction dean Isaac Asimov happily promoting a book he has written called Lecherous Limericks; Western author Louis L'Amour telling his audience how he learned about the West by listening to the old-timers who'd known Billy the Kid and getting all their names wrong; and that the entire city of Portland, Maine (pop. 600,000) was spending one week this month in trying to break all the records in the Guinness Book of Records. Bookbuyer was also privileged to be photographed with a Miss Fanne Fox, a striptease artiste famed in the USA for her liaison with the Chairman of the Senate Ways and Means Comrnittee, who is over seventy and seems not to have found any humour in his predicament or his title. Bookbuyer also had a lapel button pinned on him by a Penthouse Pet who was perspiring rather more heavily than Bookbuyer, and fought his way through perhaps a dozen after-hours parties in hotel suites where the decibel level would have made Tramps seem like a nunnery, but not once did he even glimpse the Holy Grail of a book that he could return with to England and triumphantly tout for bestsellerdom. However, he did find a guide to becoming a sensuous homosexual; a largeformat picture book to teach kids about sex called Show Me! (and made no joke or pun, which was self-discipline above and beyond); and a series of childrens' books called Me-books, in which somehow the name of the child to whom the book is to be given can be interpolated throughout the story so that he or she becomes its central character. These last will be appearing in the UK under the auspices of Macdonald & Janes.
Bookbuyer would have liked, given space he does not have, to have expounded on the number of Australians and Canadians at the Convention and their reasons for being there. He would have liked to tell you more of the activities of Mr Robin Denniston of the Thomson group, of Pan's editorial director Simon Master, and the fate of such recent. expatriates as Anthony Godwin, Mark Howell, Stephanie Bennett and Michael Meller of Gee Report fame. However, perhaps you are more interested in the books than who cooks them, the larger picture and not the small. Those of you with an eye to the future will not fail to note the significance of a deal between Germany's enormous Bertelsmann group and America's Bantam Books which will see them 'setting up a mass-market paperback house in South America. Those of you in need of reassurance will treasure the words of Mr Igor Kropotkin, of Scribner's Bookstore in New York, when asked why it was that there were twice as many booksellers in America now as ten years ago. "They think," said this chairman of the Convention, "that selling books is just more interesting than selling groceries." That note of profundity would make a good neat ending had Bookbuyer not undergone an experience even more chilling. Rounding a corner in the exhibition, he was pounced on suddenly by a small female child of seven going on thirty-eight. "Hi," she crowed. "My name is Tarcher and I'd like to take you to our stand and show you some of my daddy's wunnerful books," Bookbuyer ran.
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