Spending the day at the BEA

Spent yesterday at Book Expo America. It’s an interesting gathering that gathers industry professionals and book lovers from all over the world (and beyond, judging by a few costumes).

Although I love to see what’s going on in general, I gravitate towards those published who produce baseball titles. I wondered how the book world would fare in the face of not only an up and down economy, but incursion of technology such as the Kindle, Nook, and their brethren. There were a couple of rows in the exhibition hall devoted to such devices, but judging the the attendance, the printed word is doing just fine.

The real estate market is a metaphor for such exhibitions in that you may more for size and location. The big boys, like Simon & Schuster and Macmillian, etc. had large areas towards the middle of the huge hall at the Jacob Javitz Center in New York’s West side, while the smaller ones were scattered around the perimeter.

Among the people and places I encountered, in no particular order:

I made several visits to the Skyhorse booth to find Mark Weinstein. Skyhorse produces such titles as the (Team) by the Numbers line; Faith and Fear in Flushing, a several other baseball books that are more fun than scholarly. I couldn’t find him on the first go around and was just about to give it up when I saw that Len Berman was going to be at the Sourcebooks area to sign (galleys) copies of his upcoming book, The 25 Greatest Baseball Players of All Time, in about an hour, so I decided to stick around. Good that I did, because I made another loop to Skyhorse and found Weinstein chatting with Matthew Silverman (Mets by the Numbers, 101 Things Mets Fans Should Know and Do Before They Die, and editor of The Miracle Has Landed, just to name a couple of his baseball publications) and Stuart Shea (Wrigley Field: The Unauthorized Biography, who’s working on a team-by-team broadcasting history to be published by University of Nebraska Press). They had plans to go to the Mets game last night (a 5-0 win over the Phillies, thank you) followed by a book launch party for Dan Epstein and his new title, Big Hair and Plastic Grass at the Bell House in Brooklyn. If you’re free tonight, Epstein will be reading from his book at the Rizzoli Bookstore on 57th Street in Manhattan. Tell him I said “hi” and I’m sorry I couldn’t make it. (My, I feel like a reporter for the NY Post‘s Page Six gossip column.) By the way, up in the fall for Skyhorse: Lasting Yankee Stadium Memories: Unforgettable Tales from the House That Ruth Built, edited by Alex Belth, author of Stepping Up: The Story of Curt Flood and His Fight for Baseball Players’ Rights. Weinstein project that this might well be the last book about the fabled ballpark.
After chatting with Silverman, Shea, and Weinstein (sounds like a law firm), I ambled over to the line for Len Berman, where I ran into Dan Schlossberg, who just came out with his new book, The 300 Club: Have We Seen the Last of Baseball’s 300-Game Winners?, published by Ascend.Among other baseball titles, Schlossberg collaborated with a former Yankees favorite on his memoir, Designated Hebrew: The Ron Blomberg Story.
Maybe it was standing in line behind Schlossberg, who knew Berman, but when my turn came and I introduced myself, I was greeted with a double take. We had been exchanging correspondences for awhile based on his entertaining That’s Sports daily mailings. Berman’s a NYC sports broadcasting legend (and ill-treated by his WNBC-TV employers after so many years of service), so it’s no big deal for him, I’m sure, but for me, it’s always nice to meet these e-mail acquaintances face to face.
University of Nebraska Press puts out a fine line of titles that are a cut above the run of the mill, with a tinge of scholarship (but without the pomposity). And the fact that they were handing out very nice water bottles has no influence on my assessment. They regularly produce award-winners such as Tom Swift’s Chief Bender’s Burden and Norman Macht’s Connie Mack and the Early Years of Baseball.
Dover Publications has been re-releasing a collection of classic baseball titles, including Peter Golenbock’s Dynasty and Bums, oral histories of the Yankees and Dodgers, respectively; Even the Browns: Baseball During World War II, by William Mead; Ty Cobb’s My Twenty Years in Baseball and Connie Mack’s My 66 Years in the Big Leagues; and Voices from the Great Black Baseball Leagues, a revised edition by John Holway. “Dover is in many ways a preservationist publisher,” said Chris Kuppig, president of the organization, in a press release I received awhile back. “We make important and often out-of-print works…available to readers in affordable paperback editions. Recently, we’ve turned our attention to vintage works of sports literature. The history of sports, its unforgettable moments, and its key figures stir deep and abiding passions.” Paul Dickson, author of such classic titles himself as The Baseball Dictionary, The Hidden Language of Baseball, and Baseball: The President’s Game, is a vital cog on Dover’s sports project as a contributing editor.
Other baseball tidbits: Conspicuous in its absence from BEA this year: Triumph Books. Sorry you missed it, guys…. The Chicago Review Press will release The Pittsburgh Cocaine Seven: How a Ragtag Group of Fans Took the Fall for Major League Baseball, by Aaron Skirboll, in September. According to the CRP catalog, “[T]here has never been a book detailing the biggest drug trials in baseball history.” True, however a subsequent line reads, “The MLB participants were among the game’s elite. Implicated as cocaine users: Keith hernandez, Dave Paker, Lee Mazilli, Lonnie Smith. But the guys who took the fall for these superstars were just average fans, not heavy hitters or major drug dealers, and this book reveals the often comic circumstances of how they set up the deals –and how they got busted.” Should be mildly interesting. In the aftermath of all the steroids and PED business, this seems almost quaint, like frat boys having their first beers…. There are tons of giveaways at these meetings (a conservationist’s nightmare for all the trees that have been sacrificed for a few moments’ reading). Alan Gratz (Samurai Shortstop and The Brooklyn Nine) wrote about how he goes about his research in the Breakthrough column in the current edition of The Writer. I also discovered a hand trade publication, Radio-TV Interview Report, in which Doug Glanville is listed for his new book, The Game From Where I Stand.