In olden times (pre-2020), at the Javits Center in New York City, if you looked out of a Level 4 Pavilion window during BookExpo, you could see part of the Level 3 Exhibit Hall below. It was a moment when you almost felt like you were flying above the trade show floor, the scurrying book people, the crowded aisles, the colorful booths beneath huge banners announcing the presence of major publishers, distributors, and other "players" in the business.
Lately I've been haunted by a different vision of Javits. I'm standing on the bare cement of the abandoned Exhibit Hall floor, staring up at that same window, in which, quite faintly, I can see a spectral figure, wearing an official BookExpo badge and weighed down by tote bags full of books and swag, like Marley's chains.
In Christopher Morley's classic novel The Haunted Bookshop, the store displays a large placard in a frame that says: "THIS SHOP IS HAUNTED by the ghosts/ Of all great literature, in hosts." I've been wondering if Javits Center is haunted by a bookish ghost. I'd like to think so.
Yet another post-BookExpo season has come and gone since we last gathered at the Javits Center in 2019 for what we still considered our annual business-as-usual celebration of all things book. Maybe the haunting began the following year. Virtual BookExpo 2020, in the early, terrifying days of Covid-19, had an eerie vibe because of all the disembodied Zoom imagery, not to mention global plague literally in the air.
At the time, ReedPop said, "We are now looking forward and can't wait to return with a stronger show than ever in 2021." No such luck. By the end of the year, they had "concluded that the best way forward is to retire the current iteration of events as they explore new ways to meet the community's needs through a fusion of in-person and virtual events that will reach larger audiences than they ever could before."
Like everyone in the spring of 2020, I'd suspended any delusions about the future. By May, without BookExpo to attend, I wrote: "Imagine thousands of book people convening annually for a few days in Manhattan. Imagine a city hotel full of booksellers. Now imagine the book world we're living in this spring. Imagine bright lights, big city, no BookExpo. Imagine people who would be talking books all day--and well into the night, face to face--suddenly becoming Zoom watchers. Imagine that being the best-case scenario under tough, even life-threatening circumstances. Covid-19 hit hard, Javits became a hospital, BookExpo went virtual and we don't know what the book world will become in six months, one year or even five years."
Well, we know what it looks like three years later. BookExpo is a memory or, as it happens, a collection of memories. Recently my Facebook Memories option has been serving as a kind of medium, calling up images of BookExpos past, including:
May 24, 2010: "BookExpo America preparations: Snuck into NYC yesterday so i could see "The Mourners" at the Met. This afternoon I went to the Javits Center to pick up my badge (helps to beat the morning crowds tomorrow). Very quiet there, which will change soon. Working this afternoon. Dinner with my Shelf Awareness buddies tonight. Let the BEA games begin!"
May 27, 2011: "Back home after five excellent (and exhausting, but in the best possible way) days in NYC for BookExpo America, and it seems soooo quiet here in Saratoga Springs."
June 3, 2018:"Two photos that sum up my time in NYC last week: A view from my hotel room and an overview of BookExpo's exhibition floor at the Javits Center. Glad to be home as of 20 minutes ago."
Actually, my first inkling that Javits Center might have a bookish ghost may have happened as far back as May 30, 2020 when Facebook Memories conjured a 2017 post ("At a BookExpo not so long ago, nor far away....").
In retrospect, maybe Javits was already heading down the path to becoming a haunted book house before the plague hit. As far back as 2009, a respected indie bookseller shared some impressions with me about what was then called BookExpo America, concluding, "I hope that BEA can morph into something meaningful for publishers, authors and booksellers. There must be a way to communicate with each other, to wow each other that doesn't involve cheap Ikea-looking furniture. I think the dinners are valuable, the chance to meet authors is valuable, the empty booths are not. Something is going to change, because those vacant booths cost a lot of money."
Were the vacant booths a sign of things to come? Over the next decade, we all know that the BookExpo exhibit floor became increasingly... spacious, as fewer exhibitors participated and larger companies downsized their presence. It didn't quite reach the point where Edgar Allan Poe might have found inspiration for a story about scary book people in an abandoned glass castle, but in the years leading up to 2020 the possibility of an intervention by New York's Finest (cue Ghostbusters) didn't seem out of the question.
Does the Javits Center need a bookish exorcism? Nah. But if you do happen to be there sometime, you might just look up at that Pavilion window and wave.