SOld out / AWP Seattle

On the last day of AWP, the public can pay a small fee to visit the book fair. This makes the conference a lot less insidery—a lot more like a enclosed mall of booksellers, bookmakers, book lovers, wordsmiths, a kind of carnival of entities dedicated to wordsmithery, to books. I can imagine more beautiful rows than the AWP rows. Rows covered by glass in an open-air market. Rows along some Seine. The AWP rows are not those, but the people who populate them are the same as would populate the more picturesque, iconic rows of memory, of the imagination. When the doors open to the public, it significantly increases the ratio of readers to writers in the aisles, and so changes the tenor of the conversations one has with strangers. It would be knee-jerk to say it improves them, and I almost said it did, before I thought further. With a hour or so to go before booth tear-down (AWP is prickly about tear-down not starting too early in the day) the press has sold out of all of the copies of A Northern Spring that it brought to Seattle. Dedicated sellers? A blip the result of a beautiful cover? Time will tell. It always does.

PHOTOS: Upper left: busy vendor booths along the Seine in Paris. Upper right: Bird's-eye view of vendor rows at AWP. Lower right: Busy, open-air market street in London, seen from the top deck of a double-decker bus, as near to the front as one could get without kicking the couple seen here from behind out of the best available seats.