Stalking the ABA

by Tim W. Brown

For one brief weekend in June, 1995, Chicago was the publishing capital of the world,

curious given that book publishing barely exists as an industry here. From June 1 through 5, the

city was host to the American Booksellers Association (ABA) annual convention. Around fifteen

thousand publishers and booksellers flocked to the McCormick Place convention center and took

part in an orgy of buying and selling, where often it seemed that books were the least important

items involved. Indeed, the whole experience was largely a discouraging one, although a few

bright spots made me hopeful about the future of underground publishing.

Through my wife's involvement, I was able to attend the event for free, a welcome

development given that admission for the general public costs a hundred dollars, and this did not

include additional money required to attend various special interest seminars. I interpreted this

high price as a sign that a struggling author like myself was not welcome. This should be

expected, I guess, in a trade show designed for publishers, wholesalers and retailers. Still, I would

urge anyone interested in literature to try to attend the ABA at least once to get a picture of how

the publishing industry operates and what types of projects it values.

My experience began backstage at an event dubbed "Comedy Tonight," held Saturday

night at the recently constructed Skyline Stage on Chicago's Navy Pier. This event was organized

by the ABA to entertain convention-goers; proceeds benefitted the American Booksellers

Foundation for Free Expression, an anti-censorship group. My reason for being there was to

accompany my wife, who, as an employee of The Second City, booked a performance by actors

from that venerable comedy institution. I acted as her assistant, at least until we had cleared

Security. From that point forward, I partook of free eats -- deli sandwiches, fresh fruit, excellent
brownies -- and generally hung around the Green Room, trying to stay out of the performers' and

stage hands' way.

Although Second City was the featured act, they were largely overshadowed by others on

the program, which included Garry Marshall, Betty White and Sir Peter Ustinov, who were all

present to plug their new books. Marshall, as intense in real life as his network executive

character on Murphy Brown, served as MC. White and Ustinov wowed the crowd for ten minutes

each. The former told charming anecdotes from her long TV career; the latter cracked politically

incisive jokes and convincingly impersonated both Ron and Nancy Reagan. A Second City skit

entitled "McBooks," lampooning the book superstore phenomenon, received the heartiest laughs

of the evening -- from a crowd oblivious to its complicity in driving independents out of business.

All told, the evening was vastly entertaining, and I left impressed I had met a British knight.

Yet I came away from the experience profoundly depressed. Why? Because I had learned

the first of several lessons gleaned from the convention: that celebrity is what sells books, not

writing skill or even having something interesting to say. This, of course, is old news. But

witnessing the publicity machine in action made the lesson painfully obvious. Immediately

apparent were the handlers, two or three for each celeb, all tripping over each other while getting

chairs or soft drinks for their charges. Then there was the brochure from Prometheus Books I

picked up, which promised a $50,000 promotional budget for Ustinov's book. To supply a sense

of scale, that amount is ten times the TOTAL budget for many small press books. (If you really

want to feel depressed about the celebrity-turned-author phenomenon, imagine the one or two

dozen books that eventually will be published by people whose only qualification for being an

author is their involvement with the O.J. Simpson trial.)

I experienced the convention proper on Monday, the last day. That was when I faced the

book-selling engine in all its glory, opulence and meretriciousness. Due to their cost, I opted

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against attending any of the special seminars, which featured such contemporary Melvilles as

Ellen Degeneres, Colin Powell and Newt Gingrich, whose presence drew dozens of protesters on

the day I visited. (To be fair, there was a smattering of bona fide authors making appearances,

too, like novelist Richard Ford and poet Jessica Hagedorn.) I stuck mainly to browsing the

hundreds of publisher exhibits and speaking to a few reps who didn't immediately drop our

conversation when they learned I wasn't a buyer for Barnes & Noble or Waldenbooks.

Strolling the narrow aisles of the McCormick Place convention hall frankly reminded me

of walking through the streets of the French Quarter in New Orleans. Electric signs advertising

this or that line of cook book or sex manual alternated with sales people urging you to step over

to their booth, much like the barkers on Bourbon Street trying to get you inside their strip clubs.

Dominating the floor were the major publishers, who boasted the largest, tallest displays -- the

Time Warners, Random Houses and Little, Browns. Even though these publishers produce books

I find largely uninteresting, I quickly discovered they were worth checking out for the souvenirs

they sent you away with: buttons, coffee mugs, pens, and, in one case, a plastic-laminated first aid

guide I'm keeping in my medicine cabinet in case of emergency. You also receive massive colorful

catalogues that highlight TV star and sports hero as-told-to books due out soon.

Beyond the few major publisher displays, which seemed to be situated randomly, most

exhibitors tended to cluster together in aisles that featured like-minded products. Hence, you had

the computer area, non-English language area, children's book area, etc. The computer area held

less fascination for me than I expected. Products tended to consist of software for book selling

and inventorying rather than actual books in electronic format. Curiously, I saw nothing

resembling the books on floppy disk put out by my own electronic publisher, Spectrum Press; the

only literature I could find came in the gimmicked-up CD-ROM format from Voyager Systems.

The sizable foreign language section contained books and magazines from all over the world and

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made for fascinating browsing. Items that captured my eye most were the many magazines with

bare-breasted women on their covers. So far, American magazines, largely aimed at a population

of prudes, have not adopted this sure-fire marketing tactic used in other countries.

Viewing the basement level exhibits sunk me into the deepest depression of the whole

weekend. For here I saw the many novelty items that take up increasing amounts of shelf space in

book stores: scented candles, stuffed animals, refrigerator magnets, lighted globes, glossy

calendars, kitten posters, wrapping paper and ribbon, piggy banks, ceramic figurines, picture

frames, jigsaw puzzles, reading lamps, ergonomically correct reading chairs, decorative book

ends, tee shirts, desktop bric-a-brac, party favors, baseball cards, and thousands upon thousands

of greeting cards for every imaginable holiday. Quickly overcome by the smell of cinnamon and

vanilla wafting from owl-shaped candles everywhere I turned, I left wondering if book stores

might one day altogether abandon selling books in favor of these sundries with their much higher

profit margins.

Not everything I saw dimmed my hopes for the future of literature, however. Amidst the

whoremongering you could find pockets of respectability. For example, there was the small press

aisle, where less commercial fiction and poetry was on display and, I hope, getting ordered.

Actually, these publishers were a mixed bag for me: I liked their products, but they formed a

veritable who's who of publishers that have rejected my work. They included such names as

Bridge Works, Zoland Books and Confluence Press, where I scored a nifty letter-press chapbook

by the late poet William Stafford. In two or three instances, my presence unnerved the reps so

much they looked away in embarrassment and mumbled "Sorry" when I mentioned receiving

rejection letters from them. Conversely, I received cheerful invitations to "Be sure and try us

again, y'hear?" from a couple others.

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 A cooperative spirit reigned in this section of the convention. Splitting the cost of the

booth, several presses doubled up, like California's 2.13.61 and Incommunicado, where I met

young, sharp people publishing folks from the music and literary underground -- Henry Rollins,

Exene Cervenka, Bill Shields, Nicole Panter. That such publishers were represented at the ABA

gave me hope that voices outside the mainstream will draw the attention of booksellers, who

more than anybody shape the public's reading taste by what they stock on their shelves. Likewise,

the presence of Desert Moon and Last Gasp was encouraging. These two organizations distribute

hundreds of zine and book titles covering all aspects of fringe culture -- sex, drugs, rock and roll,

tattooing, piercing, leather, cult TV, slasher films, comics, gay and lesbian, conspiracy theories,

UFOs, anarchism, alternative medicine, pop nostalgia, you name it.

At the nearby Gates of Heck booth I witnessed an ironic spin on the developing tendency

of bookstores to stock non-literary merchandise. Here I met porn star turned performance artist

Annie Sprinkle plugging her latest project, a deck of playing cards whose faces picture a variety

of feminist icons. Turning upside-down the girly picture deck familiar to all men and boys,

Sprinkle has assembled images that celebrate the power, independence and, yes, seductiveness of

women. We became fast friends, because I gave her a copy of U-Direct containing a favorable

review of her card deck creation; in return, I received purple buttons to give away with the words

"Pleasure Activist" on them, along with a detailed drawing of a vagina.

As I spoke with Sprinkle (during which time I confess my eyes kept straying to her lightly

freckled cleavage), it occurred to me that she offered a truly innovative strategy for spreading

your message in the shadow of immense media monopolies dominating the convention floor. She

took an established format, like a book, magazine or other related item, and subverted the

daylights out of it. Then, in a form of sneak attack she mimicked how mainstream publishers call

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attention to their products: by displaying them in the most banal setting imaginable, the business

convention.

Of course, many of us in the underground can neither afford the price of a booth nor

juggle the several layers of irony needed to infiltrate the ABA. Still, the convention helped me to

learn, by looking at the antithesis, what defines the term "underground." Some people would have

you pass a litmus test of "hip" or "cool" before they consider you underground; to me, it has more

to do with process than content. Simply put, if you are publishing and distributing a book or zine

outside accepted commercial or academic channels, then you're underground.

To stay that way, attend the ABA convention (it will be in Chicago again next year), then

go home and do everything differently than how you saw it done at that oversized brothel

McCormick Place. Self publish, distribute your work through informal networks of friends, trade

your work rather than sell it, promote it through readings or ads placed in underground

publications. Above all, write for yourself, not for a corporation who would reduce your ideas to

mere commodities.