L.A. Times Festival of Books a Showcase of Authors, Bookselling, and Great Titles

Cloudy skies didn’t stop a record crowd from thronging to the seventh annual Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which was held on April 27 - 28. An estimated 140,000 people (up from last year’s 120,000) turned out for the well-publicized two-day event, held in association with, and on the campus of, UCLA.

Some 400 authors, 150 panels and readings, and over 300 exhibitors in tented booths were among the festival’s lures. The many writers present included David Halberstam, Anita Diamant, Maya Angelou, Ishmael Reed, Ray Bradbury, Michael Connelly, Steve Martin, Frances Fitzgerald, bell hooks, and Carolyn See.

"In a place that is frequently described as monstrously disconnected," said an enthusiastic D.J. Waldie (author of Real City: Downtown Los Angeles Inside/Out and the award-winning memoir Holy Land), "an event like this brings many, many people together for a couple of days of comity, in a setting that encourages that sense of community that Los Angeles so desperately needs."

Waldie, a local-government official in the city of Lakewood who writes occasionally for the Los Angeles Times Book Review and the paper’s "Opinion" section, was participating in his sixth L.A. Times Festival of Books. The annual gathering, he thought, provided an excellent chance for many booksellers to meet patrons from outside their usual base: "People who would never have come to their store, because their store is at the end of the Valley, or at the end of the county, or in Malibu. But they’re here, in this pleasant, rather centralized location: readers from all over the county, and in every color, every ethnicity. It is just an astonishing opportunity for those who sell books to encounter new parts of their market in Southern California."

Buyers seeking autographed books from a festival author often had the option either of waiting in line at a signing area after that writer’s panel, or of encountering the writer later at an independent bookseller’s booth.

Mysterious Galaxy was one such indie holding hourly booth signings throughout the weekend with such authors as Donald E. Westlake.

This was the sixth festival for the San Diego store, said co-owner Jeff Mariotte: "They’ve all been exceptional. We’ve never been disappointed in what we’ve done here; it’s always a terrific weekend."

Some of the independents present (which included Book Soup, Dutton’s Brentwood, Pathfinder Bookstore, UCLA Bookzone, and The USC Bookstore) informally estimated this would be their best festival yet in terms of sales.

No doubt responsible in part for this year’s record turnout was the extensive on-air promotion given the festival by its media sponsors: eight local radio and television stations (including NPR affiliate KPCC-FM and KTLA-TV), some of which did live broadcasts from the campus.

C-SPAN2’s BookTV devoted hours of live coverage to the festival on both Saturday and Sunday. The network also taped many events for future airing.

The festival’s author panels (held in 16 venues around campus) were free, but tickets were required. Many events (including a discussion with John W. Dean, Arianna Huffington, Oliver Stone, and Robert Scheer; and various crime-fiction panels) were "sold out" immediately.

Lines for signed books from popular writers such as Mary Higgins Clark, Ray Bradbury, and Julie Andrews often stretched the equivalent of half a block.

In this its seventh year, the L.A. Times Festival of Books still attracted new participants, from authors such as Thomas Keneally (American Scoundrel: The Life of the Notorious Civil War General Dan Sickles), who expressed gratitude at his first-ever invitation to speak on a nonfiction panel ("Usually I’m asked to talk about fiction, or the boundaries of same"); to booksellers such as Mitchell Books (whose John Mitchell was so pleased with the event, he said, "Next year I think I’ll take two booths"); to literary publications like the Oxford American ("The Southern Magazine of Good Writing"), whose public relations director Katharine Walton thought the festival provided a fine opportunity "to introduce the magazine to a whole new region and its readers."

The only festival event to charge admission was Saturday evening’s 22nd presentation of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes, in UCLA’s Royce Hall.

The ceremony -- emceed by Sandra Tsing Loh (A Year in Van Nuys), with opening remarks by Book Prize Director Kenneth Turan (Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made), and closing remarks by Times Book Editor Steve Wasserman -- awarded prizes in nine categories (see below); with the fiction prize notably going to Mary Robison’s Why Did I Ever.

This year’s Robert Kirsch Award for a distinguished body of work by a writer from or writing about the West was bestowed on 90-year-old Tillie Olsen, who was present to accept with eloquence.

Receiving his Book Prize in the Science and Technology category, English author Richard Hamblyn (The Invention of Clouds) paid spontaneous tribute to the well-attended, multi-generational Los Angeles Times Festival of Books, which he called a unique celebration and expression of our culture.

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Winners of the 22nd Los Angeles Times Book Prizes:

Mystery/Thriller: T. Jefferson Parker, Silent Joe (Hyperion)

Poetry: Anne Carson, The Beauty of the Husband: A Fictional Essay in 29 Tangos (Knopf)

Current Interest: Barbara Ehrenreich, Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America (Metropolitan/Henry Holt)

Fiction: Mary Robison, Why Did I Ever (Counterpoint)

Biography: Edmund Morris, Theodore Rex (Random House)

The Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction: Rachel Seiffert, The Dark Room (Pantheon)

History: Rick Perlstein, Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Consensus (Hill and Wang/Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Young Adult Fiction: Mildred D. Taylor, The Land (Phyllis Fogelman/Penguin Putnam)

Science and Technology: Richard Hamblyn, The Invention of Clouds: How an Amateur Meteorologist Forged the Language of the Skies (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) -- Tom Nolan