BY: ED V

Books, sweat, sushi, friends, sweat, boxes, and more sweat: Grant manager Ed V chronicles his adventures at this year's BookExpo America in New York City, and gets Simpson-ized!

Hi, everyone! I'm Ed Valado. You might remember me from Bookmans forum threads like "BEA 2006, Oh my!", and "Practical Gnome Wrestling: It's not sticky any more!".

Okay, sorry. I "stole" a Troy McClure line. But it's only because, for me, the highlight of BookExpo America 2007 was getting to hang out with Phil Ortiz, one of the Simpsons animators who was there representing Cartoonists Across America. Not only was he a great guy to chat with, he Simpson-ized me!

Anyway, the show. This year was a bit stranger than most due to some unfortunate absences. In attendance was "New Testament" Katy Ransom, "Old Testament" Katie Downing, "Super Monkey Horny" Sheila Kressler-Crowley, and me, Troy McClure..err...I mean Ed. I should have known our first day was going to be weird when we walked into the Javitz Center to find that it was hotter and more humid inside than outside. I was instantly covered with a sheen of sweat all over which quickly soaked through my be-suited body - I'll spare you any pictures from that day, dear reader, except for this one from outside the show.

Yeah, its looks like a nice day, but trust me, it was a scorcher, and not made for chubby guys in business suits.

Ignoring the awful temperature omens, we commenced "doing our thing." For those that don't know what our thing is, we cruise the show, checking out publisher booths. When we see one with interesting titles, we approach the rep and attempt to buy the contents of the booth on the last day and establish a contact for future purchasing of hurts and remainders that we can sell in our stores. This gives our stores a nice influx of shiny new stuff at a reasonable price, and it allows the vendors to "walk away" from their booth at the end of the show and not worry about packing it up or shipping costs or what have you. It's a very symbiotic relationship that has worked well for us in the past, and gained us many cool friendships with publishers from all over world. That's our "thing" at the BEA, in a nutshell.

This year was a bit different. People doing the same thing that we were doing had swarmed all over the show and snatched up some really great booths right out from under us. Of course, we still had our long established relationships with many publishers, so it wasn't like we walked away with nothing, but in the past, I've been accustomed to being able to pick up small and interesting booths that we ran across because we were one of the only people doing what we do. Having strangers say "No" over and over in a hot and humid convention center while wearing a suit is quite possibly one of the suckier experiences a book person has to go through, I think. (I used to think it was cleaning our public bathrooms on a Friday night - now, bring on the rubber gloves and Formula 409!)

It wasn't all bad, and, as usual, I'm exaggerating a bit. We did manage to pick up a couple of random booths with good stuff that we hadn't already planned on. And seeing the people that we'd done business with before light up when we approach their booth was tonic for our demoralized souls. Jessica and the Inner Traditions crew, Ausbert from Assouline ( the most distinguished gentleman on the planet - even though he looks different, think Ricardo Montalban, but with way more class), Nadine from Abbeville (who shares a love of fine tequilas with me and always treats me like family, even when we owe her money), and Joan from Merrell (whose ethereal beauty and poise always reminds me of that elf chick from the "Lord of the Rings"). And there are many more. Too many to name. Those are the people that come to my mind whenever I think of the BEA because I usually end up being responsible for their booths - packing books, moving boxes, getting them tape, massaging a shoulder; anything that needs doing. They were definitely the bright spot of an otherwise depressing day.

The next day, things got immensely better. Aaron "Huzzah!" Thornburg showed up! For those of you that know Aaron, I think you'll agree that he is an energetic, "take charge" kind of guy. He's also done millions of these trade shows and knows the routine better then anyone. His arrival on Saturday (at great personal expense due to the fact that he very recently became a daddy for the second time to a wonderful baby boy and had to leave his family on very short notice to come help us) immediately set our minds at ease. We hit the show, I put him on auto-follow (warning! WoW reference) and tried to keep up with his "trade show stride," which is basically power-walking on crack. He met up with our regulars, smoothed out details, and took control of a chaotic situation, rescuing it from the certain destruction the rest of us had thought we'd taken it to. It was a beautiful thing to observe.

The last day, "Work Day From Hell", was just as painful and gratifying as always. Despite the feeling that we hadn't scored many books, the reality is we had bought tons of them and we had to organize and move everything around the show floor. As usual, we lacked any boxes or carts, and even though "New Testament" Katy and I had to go dumpster diving (surprisingly, the dumpsters in the NYC convention center are much nicer and less stinky then the ones in DC - go figure), we managed to "acquire" plenty of boxes and a cart. "Project: Cart Acquisition" was particularly funny. I basically walked into the non-public underground area beneath the convention center (a real cool/creepy maze of concrete tunnels and mysterious steel doors), looked for a grouping of carts, approached the first person I saw and told them "John from catering said I should grab a cart. Can I take one of these?" Apparently "John" carries a lot of weight around the convention center because the nice guy I talked to told me to go ahead and grab one and walked me out to the loading dock, chatting about stuff. I guess enough people saw us together that they figured I was entitled to the cart, and I wasn't hassled about it for the rest of the show. For a minute there, I felt James Bond (Roger Moore-era) infiltrating a top secret Soviet Missile installation and making it out alive, unruffled, and with a sexy Soviet defector (the cart, I named her Svetlana) and the plans for the ultra-deadly-threat-to-democracy-WMD. Life was good.