What a swell party it might have been, with John Udpike regaling guests with stories about his golf handicap, Joan Didion spinning tales of political intrigue in tropical quagmires, Mario Puzo spilling more beans about Mafia dons and Anne Rice making small talk about genies, demons and the Black Death. For background music, Peter Duchin on the piano.
Each of these writer celebs has a book due on the market later in the year, and under other circumstances that would have made them likely headliners at the American Booksellers Association’s annual circus maximus Saturday through Monday at McCormick Place, the second year in a seven-year engagement. Like couturiers, automakers and hardware manufacturers at similar expositions, publishers from around the world preview their fall ready-to-read merchandise for booksellers, often importing their A-list authors for personal appearances, not only on the convention floor but also in hotel ballrooms, suites and penthouses, restaurants and assorted whoopee zones.
For Updike, Didion and the other authors, however, the party was over long before it began because of a nasty legal imbroglio between their corporate publisher, Random House, and the ABA. An organization largely made up of “independent” bookstore owners, the ABA sued Random House in January for antitrust violations, accusing the publisher of giving price breaks to its mortal enemies, Barnes & Noble, Borders and other superstores.
By wholesaling its books to the superstores at reduced prices, Random House was hastening the demise of undernourished independents, the ABA insisted. The publishing colossus denied the charge, then just as promptly retaliated by pulling out of the convention. “It wasn’t a surprise,” says ABA executive director Bernie Rath, who has negotiated settlements with three other publishers in price discrimination suits. “Some people thought Random House was above that kind of retribution, but they weren’t.”
It’s not retribution, counters Harold Evans, president and publisher of Random House trade books, commenting on the suit, but a justifiable response to the ABA’s extremely rude behavior. “It was like being invited to a dinner party and having the host tell you, `By the way, we want to put you in prison,’ ” he says.
Because of the hostilities, Evans will miss out not only on the convention (which he calls “an exhausting but stimulating snapshot into the world of publishing that is very hard to reproduce”) but also the annual bacchanal given by The New Yorker magazine, which inaugurates the extra-literary festivities Friday night at Green Dolphin Street, a North Side nitery.
What makes Evans’ forced absence all the more personally regrettable is that his wife, Tina Brown, is editor of The New Yorker. Though Evans won’t be attending the party, surely Brown will be here. Right? “I don’t know,” Evans says. “We get very little time to chat. I’ve got news for you. She runs her own life.”
The summary departure of Random House, which includes the publishing house bearing that venerable name and a multitude of imprints (Knopf, Pantheon, Villard and Times Books, among the more distinguished), left vacant an estimated 8,700 square feet of prime real estate on the floor of McCormick Place. But not for long, according to Rath, who says that other publishers “just jumped into the space that Random House gave up.”
Missing its `biggest players’
Even without Random House, Rath says he is anticipating more conventioneers than ever, including sizable delegations from Russia and China. He estimates a crowd in excess of 40,000 for what has evolved in a few decades from a relatively cozy clan meeting of U.S. publishers and booksellers into an international multimedia floor show and saturnalia, loaded not only with booksellers, publishers and authors, but also with agents, editors, journalists, dealmakers, professional freeloaders, sound-bite specialists and so many merchants of soft- and hardware, CD-ROMs and video games that it might be an extension of Comdex, the computer show that preceded it in McCormick Place.
Random House’s withdrawal, which followed that of Viking Penguin and St. Martin’s, two other New York publishers that were targets of ABA suits several years ago, left the convention without three of its “biggest players,” says publicist Gail Rentsch.
Noting that Simon & Schuster and various other publishers are reducing their troops, Rentsch says she considered skipping the ABA, then decided to come “because that would give me more time to spend with small publishers, and a lot of things are happening with them.”
The dispute with Random House, along with other “worrisome” convention business, was especially disheartening for Roberta Rubin, owner of the Bookstall at Chestnut Court in Winnetka. She was among the Chicago-area booksellers who lobbied hardest to anchor the ABA convention in Chicago through 2001.
“I don’t have any real fervor for it this year,” says Rubin, adding that she had been admonished by ABA directors “not to side with Random House because I’m supposedly in on the lawsuit, but I’m certainly not as ardent or strident–or as angry–as they are. I’ll miss so many aspects of Random House’s presence–their books, their marketing, their publicity.”
For Richard Howorth, the Random House defection wasn’t a reason to cancel his annual trek from Oxford, Miss., where he operates Square Books. “It’s not going to stop me from having fun. And what appears to be happening is that the absence of Random House is making it easier for Simon & Schuster, Bantam Doubleday Dell and some of the other publishers to more easily capture the attention of booksellers.”
That would help explain the exceptionally high spirits of Jacqueline Deval, an associate publisher at William Morrow, who doesn’t expect the ABA litigation to spoil the convention mood, “at least for those of us who are not being sued.”
“I’m happy to have less competition for the events we’re doing,” says Deval, whose publishing house is giving away 1,000 brownies at its convention booth to plug its recipe anthology “Baking With Julia (Child)” and playing host to a Saturday night reception at Grappa, a Streeterville bistro, for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and his forthcoming book, “Black Profiles in Courage.”
Formerly an executive with a Random House imprint, Deval says she knows a number of the publisher’s present employees who “are cheering because they don’t have to go to ABA this year. It’s a tremendous amount of hard work, and they feel as if they’ve gotten a reprieve.”
Others will miss the convention’s party atmosphere, even though the number of social extravaganzas was being reduced well before the outbreak of hostilities, according to Morrow’s Deval. “Publishers have been putting less money into these events because booksellers are really looking for extra discounts or things that are going to help them sell books, rather than big fancy entertainment,” she says.
Big on glamor
If the fancy entertainment is in shorter supply this year, the convention won’t be entirely lacking in brand-name author/entertainers. “For us, it’s one of the most glamor-driven ABAs ever,” says Stuart Applebaum, a vice president of Bantam Doubleday Dell, whose entourage will be topped by Mia Farrow, John Grisham, Cindy Crawford and Sarah Ferguson, a k a the Duchess of York (arriving in Chicago on the royal heels of her ex-sister-in-law, the Princess of Wales, to tout two books of modern fairy tales for young readers).
Also supplying marquee power are Art Buchwald, Janet Dailey, Ray Bradbury, Louise Erdrich, Ivan Doig, Andrew Young, Elie Wiesel, Neil Simon and a cast of a hundred others. They’ll give command performances at autographings, coffees, teas, breakfasts, lunches, dinners and pigouts in the exhibition hall as well as at bookstores and at assorted other literary precincts in Chicago (notably Printers Row, the scene of the annual book fair Saturday and Sunday). Perhaps the convention’s oddest sociopolitical coupling is that of Ross Perot and Sen. Paul Simon, who have collaborated on a book, titled not “The Ayes and Ears Have It” but “The Dollar Crisis.”
As always, the more unconventional rites will range from the sacred–a Sunday reception at Cardinal Joseph Bernardin’s Near North mansion for a book about his eminence by John H. White and Eugene Kennedy–to the profane, e.g. Playboy magazine’s Thursday hoedown for campaign dervish James Carville at Bub City. Not to be ignored are Janet Dailey’s panel appearance on behalf of literacy and the launching ceremonies for a new computer series called KickAss books.
The ABA’s Rath hopes logistical problems won’t plague this year’s convention as they did last year, when the event coincided with the city’s Blues Fest in Grant Park and thousands of conventioneers were marooned at McCormick Place, waiting for cabs and buses.
“We had 40,000 very angry people trapped out there,” Rath remembers. “The transportation infrastructure just collapsed around us. The food was lousy, they ran out of coffee at 10 in the morning. . . .”
He has more cause for optimism this year, noting that the convention has been split into two exhibition halls to relieve the congestion. “We’re bending over backward–with extra buses, giving every delegate a Metra pass,” he says. Even so, he is bracing himself for further grief.
“I have a lot of people in front of me to absorb the shock but the buck always stops with me. Personally, I just want it to be over.”
PAGES OF EVENTS FOR BOOK LOVERS
Without the proper badges (or gate-crashing skills), even the most obsessive book lover won’t get onto the floor of McCormick Place this weekend to sample the riches at the American Booksellers Association trade and floor show. Though the convention is a closed shop, two other events will allow visitors to indulge their appetite for books, authors and other matters related to the printed, spoken and recorded word.
– The oldest and best known is the Printers Row Book Fair, back for a 12th year Saturday and Sunday in its traditional spot, between the Dearborn Street Station and the Harold Washington Library, with five blocks’ worth of merchants offering new, used and rare books. Among the 70 or so authors on hand are Ana Castillo, Nora Roberts, Angela Jackson, Donald Hall, Julie Parson-Nesbitt, Rosellen Brown, James Carroll, Nicole Hollander, James Patterson and the “Chicken Soup for the Soul” team of Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen. (For schedule information, call 312-987-9896.)
The winners of the Chicago Public Schools Young Authors Competition will get a turn in the spotlight from 1 to 3 p.m. Sunday, with readings from their prize poems and stories. This year’s other special events include a writers’ resource bazaar; a chef’s tent; and programs and panels devoted to mystery writers, gay, African-American and Hispanic literature, and women’s spirituality.
– Spirituality is the focus of another quasi-literary event on the weekend calendar, In Spirit ’96, a new–or New Age–
celebration that includes symposiums, workshops and a slide show at the Field Museum, Friday through Sunday, with such writers as Marilyn Clancy, James Swan, Tony Lawlor, Jerry Wilhelm, Stephanie Mills and Julia Cameron. The festival concludes a six-week project called “Sacred Spaces/Public Places.” For information, call 847-501-5396.
Like the American Booksellers jamboree just down the street, In Spirit ’96 offers bread as well as circuses. Most notably there will be a replica of a Chicago landmark made from bread dough, and the “world’s largest organic salad.” Both are centerpieces of the Natural Food Festival, an alternative Taste of Chicago Friday through Sunday in Soldier Field.
