May 03, 2010

Over at Best American Poetry: On Signings

Want to see what happiness looks like? See Politics & Prose on Sunday. Here's the view as I hide during the introduction to my reading...






...and here is the audience smiling to say hello to you all:






Afterwards, there were books to sign. A lot of books. I took far too long with each one--as always, I find myself slipping back into the mode of signing high school yearbooks--and while there are certain phrases that come easily to me, I always approach each title page from scratch. The ritual of this had me wondering: as people tout the future of the book in electronic form, what happens to the tradition of author signings? 


You can read the rest of the post here....

3 comments:

Diane Lockward said...

What a beautiful sight! It renews my faith.

bill said...

Fun post. Once I bought a signed autobiography of the dancer Suzanne Farrell from ABE. Years later I took a class from Ms. Farrell at the Kennedy Center. I brought in the book and after class asked her to inscribe it. Those imperious eyebrows shot way up when she saw that she had already signed the book, but she recovered and wrote a very kind note.

Stephanie said...

Great post. With all this talk about e-books, I had of course thought about the loss of physical books but I hadn't even considered book signing. Man that'd be tragic.

And I once stumbled across a signed first edition of the first book by a favorite poet of mine and was so excited but also sad that it had a personal note with it. If that person is still alive, I wonder why he got rid of the book.