R(-O-C-)K at the BEA

(Update: I do not have a middle name. My parents were very poor. So sometimes I fiddle around with one to see what kind of junk mail it engenders. The latest one is “Fitzgerald.”)

Spent the day at the BookExpo America at the Javitz Center in Manhattan. It’s always fun to see what the industry is planning. It’s also interesting to see the demarcations. The big house, like Simon & Schuster and Harlequin, have the prime real estate: center and huge. I imagine the farther away you get from the center, the more economical the rent. The publishers are showing off their new products and trying to get orders from book merchants. Celebrities and authors show up to sign their books (it seemed that one line waiting for author sigs extended almost the width of the exhibition hall; I never did find out who they were waiting for). And writers — experienced and novice — were also there trying to get publishers interested in their latest manuscripts.

It was nice seeing some of the folks, primarily in publicity and marketing, with whom I’ve been dealing for awhile.

The publishers have their fall and winter catalogs, so I was able to get a sneak preview at some of the new baseball titles coming down the pike.

Of course, not all the companies had there stuff available, so this is by no means complete. In addition, most of the baseball books come out in the spring/summer.

Stewart Tabori & Chang (Abrams): The Classic Mantle, by Buzz Bissinger — two “superstars” paired up for this 5×7, 144-page book, coming in October.

Triumph Books usually published its baseball books in the spring, but Total Mets: The Definitive Encyclopedia of the New York Mets, by David Ferry can be considered an early holiday present. This promises to be one of the more thorough Mets-centric projects by someone not named Matthew Silverman. Total Mets weighs in at more than 750 pages for the reasonable price of $29.95.

Potomac, which specializes in military topics, has the edge for their Fall/Winter catalog with five baseball titles, including

Bat, Ball & Bible: Baseball and Sunday Observance in New York, Charles DeMotte (December)
Keepers of the Game: When the Baseball Beat Was the Best Job on the Paper, by Dennis D’Agostino (February)
Errors and Fouls: Inside Baseball’s Ninety-Nine Most Popular Myths, by Dennis Handrinos (March)
All The Babe’s Men: Baseball’s Greatest Home Run Seasons and How They Changed America, by Eldon L. Ham (March)
Tales from First Base: The Best, Funniest, and Slickest First Basemen Ever, by Brad Engel and Wayne Stewart (March)

But the highlight for me was seeing Rob Taylor of University of Nebraska Press, who has been my mentor during this educational process of bringing the 501 Project to press next spring. I’m on a bit of hiatus as the manuscript goes through the system. Once I got home, my daughter, Rachel, took my publicity photos. In retrospect, perhaps buzzing my hair yesterday was not such a good idea.