Scenes from the Book Trade

This is supposed to be a business event. Delegates to the 87th convention of the American Booksellers Assn., a record crowd of 21,000, are supposed to be touting the titles of autumn, promising them spots on booksellers’ shelves.

But business here is disguised in a blitz of events, a kind of modern pentathlon of merchandising. Five days of nonstop parties. Freebies that fill whole suitcases. Elvis Presley look-alikes. Lollipops for grown-ups, interviews with comic-book characters, Santa Claus on Memorial Day weekend.

“For us, this is serious business,” said Robert Haft, president and founder of the mighty Crown Books chain of bookstores. “We have buyers from all over. We brought three separate people from L.A. to do buying.”

Scenes Across Town

The fact that Haft was, at that moment, standing beside a gigantic, elaborately decorated Christmas tree and that a government worker moonlighting as Santa was passing out tiny, holly-trimmed boxes of Godiva chocolates in no way detracted from his earnestness or his credibility.

Psychologist-author Leo Buscaglia, guest of honor (for his forthcoming “Seven Stories of Christmas Love”) at William Morrow’s “Christmas in May” party, was cheerfully hugging everyone in sight--this, of course, being his business at the ABA.

Across town, the several hundred guests under a tent at Decatur House, around the corner from the White House, were acutely aware of the steamy starting signs of Washington’s notorious sweatshop summer. That party, for G. P. Putnam’s authors Art Buchwald and Tom Clancy, saw silk dresses clinging to guests who discreetly battled the first phalanxes of Potomac gnats and mosquitoes.

Not 12 hours later, a smaller, perhaps hardier group of ABA-ers was spotted studying cicadas, the legendary singing insects that appear here once every 17 years, on a pre-breakfast hike near Rock Creek Park.

“Arms up! Arms up!” thundered Gary Yanker, leader of this ABA “wake-up walk” and author of “Gary Yanker’s Sportwalking” (Contemporary Books). “Opposite arm, opposite foot! Arms pumping, straight back, straight forward! While you are walking, try to make each step a little longer.”

Nowhere was that advice more fitting than at this city’s Convention Center, where ABA booths sprawled across two block-long floors like so many miniature condominium complexes.

“ABA Is Hell,” said a button designed by Pantheon cartoonist Matt Groening, and many who were wearing it took it only partly in jest.

“Listen, I would much rather be home celebrating the anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge,” said Mary Rasmussen of Military Books in Vallejo, Calif. “But this is a working weekend.

Finding Out What’s Hot

“You get to meet the people you deal with, the people I hear all year on my message machine,” she said. “Like Stackpole Books. For seven years, I’ve been talking to this lady on the phone and I’ve never met her.”

Besides, said Rasmussen, traipsing the convention floor with two foot-weary co-workers, “you get to find out, say, when Oprah (Winfrey)’s book is coming out. (It’s in July.) You see who’s promoting what. Right now, I say, hey, Max Headroom is hot.”

So are health books, said Crown Books’ Haft, particularly in his San Fernando Valley stores. “You’ve got a tremendous interest in health. New diets. Walking instead of running--that’s a new trend. And babies. A lot of people are having babies.” As proof, Haft whipped out a picture of his own baby, 6-month-old Michael Alexander Haft.

Two months ago, when Waldenbooks shocked many in the book industry by announcing its pullout from this year’s ABA, some people speculated that the annual frenzy might just be outliving its usefulness. Once secondary, the phenomena of author publicity and sales of subsidiary rights have grown steadily in their significance at ABA. Small presses and major publishing houses grumbled that a lottery system of booth assignment had produced random space allotment that made some exhibitors feel as if they had been sentenced to the Gulag. Simon and Schuster, one giant house, announced that after “examining the rate of return ABA has had for us over the years,” it had cut its display space significantly as well as halving the number of people attending ABA.

Would smaller regional bookselling conventions spring up in lieu of the massive falderal known as ABA?

Waldenbooks, announcing a three-day event next month at its headquarters in Stamford, Conn., seemed to be suggesting a move in a direction that would probably increase the role of smaller, more geographically dispersed publishing houses.

‘Get a Complete Overview’

But Rodman Froke, a buyer for Stacey’s Bookstore in San Francisco, had his doubts. As crazy as it is, the present setup of ABA, he said, affords “the one place that you can get a complete overview of what’s happening in publishing.”

“There’s a lot of good will created for the publishers,” said Catherine Farley, a story editor from Santa Monica representing a cadre of independent film companies.

“This is the one time when you can collect a lot of information,” said Farley. “It’s a way for a lot of small companies to be ahead on acquiring the things you want, good books.”

Margaret Burk, head of the Los Angeles-based Round Table West book-and-author luncheons, called the ABA “the heart of the book business, the pulse of the book business, the hub around which everything circulates.”

“If you want to know anything about books,” Burk said, “you have to be here.”

Confessing that he had “barely been out of the booth,” Abrams president and publisher Paul Gottlieb suggested that this year’s ABA was marked by a feeling of “relative buoyancy and optimism” among people in the book business. Book sales were up, said Gottlieb, but so was book production.

“There are so many more books being published every year,” he said, citing a current figure “getting close” to 50,000 new titles annually.

The atmosphere was “spirited,” Gottlieb said, though he noted a distinct decline in the hype-and-hoopla factor.

“There used to be much more of that,” he said. As for the relentless socializing at ABA, “There are of course the great parties. But that has always gone on.”

Here in Washington, however, the settings of some of those parties could not help but inspire a small measure of awe.

Capital Luminaries

On Sunday afternoon, a collection of independent literary agents held a champagne reception at the Reflecting Pool, in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial. Former House Speaker Tip O’Neill (author of “Man of the House,” from Random House) signed autographs that same evening in the Cannon Caucus Room at the U.S. Capitol. In the headquarters of the House Rules Committee, Rep. Claude Pepper (D-Fla.) was celebrating the upcoming publication of his book (with co-author Hays Gorey), “Pepper: Eyewitness to a Century,” for Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Columnist-novelist William Safire, meanwhile, took it upon himself to represent “the heavy intellectual community of Washington” with a lavish sit-down dinner at his home in suburban Maryland. Along with Washington Post editor Ben Bradlee and his novelist wife, Sally Quinn, that A-list gathering drew new CIA director William Webster, the obvious star attraction.

Safire quipped that he had signed his contract for his 1,000-page Civil War-themed novel “Freedom” in 1979, when life for Doubleday writers and editors was more placid. Now, with the company’s takeover by the giant German concern Bertelsmann, Safire said that when he goes out to lunch, “I tell my secretary that if my editor calls from Doubleday, get his name.”

Meanwhile, at a luncheon hosted by Waco, Tex.-based Word Publishing, the “amens” that passed around the table at a remark from Word vice president Ron Land might well have been echoed by large numbers of convention-goers trekking the aisles at ABA.

Of the ever-quirky business of publishing, Land said: “There’s a lot of divine intervention in bringing out any book today.”