SIBA: One Wedding, No Funerals, Lots of Books

Our intrepid correspondent Frazer Dobson, a sales rep and co-owner of Park Road Books, Charlotte, N.C., reported from the Southern Independent Booksellers Alliance trade show a week ago:

SIBA is a rite of fall as important as cooler weather and college football. What's not to like? Free books! Favorite authors! The African-American cowboy! (He's always there, and it's hard to imagine a SIBA without him.) Drinking with other booksellers in the hotel bar! Both as a bookseller and a rep, I have always preferred the intimacy of the SIBA show to the impersonal sprawl that is BEA. For one thing, nearly all of the booths feature actual books, and the publisher reps and authors are much more accessible. It's always a fun weekend, and the 2011 show was no exception.

This year Our Bookselling Heroes gathered in lovely Charleston, S.C., where the food scene is exquisite, and the ambience is oddly comforting despite Charleston's reputation for snootiness. It should be a great book town, but Charleston has very few bookstores, although the Heirloom Book Company (specializing in cookbooks) opened this year, and there are several excellent used and antiquarian shops.

Now that I'm a rep, I help set up the Workman booth, a job I am uniquely unqualified to do--I have the feng shui skills of a dung beetle. Fortunately, Katie Ford and Kelly Bowen from Algonquin and my wife, Sally Brewster, made the booth look like a winner while I grunted with the effort of assembling a fixture for Como Sales' newest addition to the lineup, Sprout Greetings, which sells adorable Sandra Boynton greeting cards.  "Hippo Birdie Two Ewe," anyone? Aside from the delightful Sprout cards, Workman featured a full slate of heavy hitters: a new revised and updated edition of the bestselling 1000 Places to See Before You Die, Black Dog and Leventhal's formidable The Louvre: All the Paintings and Hillary Jordan's (Mudbound) powerful new novel for Algonquin, When She Woke, among many others. We had great neighbors too; the booth was backed up to the Perseus/PGW booth (where rep and true gentleman Jon Mayes made Sally's weekend with a copy of a new Jane Whitefield novel from Thomas Perry) and next door to McClung and Associates, which had a stellar collection of small press books and great retro games from Perisphere and Trylon.

The SIBA schedule changed this year--the show floor was open Sunday and Monday rather than Saturday and Sunday. After booth setup, and a lovely small gathering of reps on Saturday evening, plus a SIBA supper that featured such luminaries as Sandra Brown, Karen White, Ted Dekker and Thomas Mullen, the floor opened first thing Sunday to a flood of booksellers. Sally said her favorite part of the show was, simply, "The books." I agree. After a long spring and summer of seeing the books only in publisher catalogues, we were chomping at the bit to see the finished products, and they did not disappoint. Sally also loved the "South Carolina: The Palmetto State" panel she sat in on that featured S.C. historian Walter Edgar and artists Mary Whyte (whose amazingly detailed watercolors have been favorites in our store and many others for years) and Jonathan Green. "They were great ambassadors for South Carolina," Sally said. And she especially appreciated the New York publishers who sent people from the office down to Charleston; Workman COO Walter Weintz was in our booth, and Penguin Putnam also sent down many people from New York, with whom we had a fantastic dinner at the legendary McCrady's on Sunday night. We always enjoy the opportunity to show our Yankee friends a little Southern hospitality.

At lunchtime on Sunday, my booth mates and I headed off for the Southern Life Lunch, which featured Hillary Jordan, Stuart Dill, Michael Lee West and one of our favorite authors, novelist and poet Ron Rash. Ron read two exquisite poems along with a brief bit of his new novel, The Cove, which will be landing next spring. Hillary Jordan meanwhile gave the event a stellar finish; her new novel When She Woke does not shy away from controversy, and she brought down the house by musing that she should send autographed copies to Rick Perry and Michelle Bachmann.  

The annual Writer's Block Auction featured the wedding of my friend and SIBA staffer Sara Malcolm and her beau, Brandon Perry. Wanda Jewell, SIBA's indefatigable executive director, had asked Sally and me to stand on stage during the wedding (we met at SEBA, as it used to be called, in 2002), and so after a couple of glasses of champagne, we found ourselves part of the wedding procession. The women wore corsages, the men plastic fedoras. Making for an impressive sight, if I do say so myself, we wound our way through the convention center to the stage. Sara was luminous in her dress, and Brandon wore, as has been reported, a blazer covered with the book jackets from the authors who were being auctioned off. This impressive garment was not very flexible, so we had to help Brandon into it. (I felt like a squire helping his knight prepare for a joust.) Wanda, an ordained Universal Life Church minister, performed the ceremony with a hilarious Power Point slideshow, somehow managing to work the titles of all the authors' books into her blessing. Afterward, as Sally and I poured champagne for the bride and groom and assembled authors (and we went through a lot of bubbly that day, my friends), the authors all gave toasts to the new couple.  

By Monday morning, we were all tired but happy. I collected a stack of Workman orders, and Sally placed a stack for our store. It's a truly great thing to spend a weekend in the company of so many wonderful like-minded people. I'm already looking forward to 2012 in Naples, Fla.