Remember that work thing? Well, here's what I'm doing tomorrow and Saturday.

Sacramento Antiquarian Book Fair

Sept 18th -- That's THIS SATURDAY!!!!

Thirty boxes + packed in the car today and I'm nearly ready to hit the road tomorrow.  As you've probably guessed, I tend to over-pack (Ya think?). At any rate, I'll take the thirty boxes with me -- whether I stuff all those books onto the shelves is entirely a different matter. But I'll have them if I need them. Tomorrow is set up day, with the book fair on Saturday, bright and early at 10:00. 

Personally, I'll be out the door on Saturday morning at 6:30 AM to make it to Sacto with extra time.

I'm bringing a goodly number of new items in all sorts of subjects -- I've got a bunch of new Modern Fiction, some funky Non-Fiction items, some ephemera (found the sheet music the other day, so I'll have some of that too) Most Science Fiction / Fantasy and more (yeah, thirty boxes worth -- here's the math for you ..... thirty boxes of books with approx. 35 books per box (more for the picture books -- which tend to have 60-75) ...
averaging out to 1100 books.

Yeah, I'm over-packing. But hey, it works for me.

As far as sales -- well, I'd love to have LOTS, but in reality, I might have somewhere around 35-40 books sold by the end of the day (and yes, this is a fraction of a percent of what I'll be bringing ....  if my calculator is correct, and if I've worked the problem the right way around it comes to .0333 percent of the books I bring).

If, however, one of those books has a somewhat higher price tag, it works for me.

So why, you might ask, do you bring ALL THOSE BOOKS when you might just bring your high end stock and sell one or two?

You try it and see why .... I've said this before and I'm not the first one to say it. Book fairs are like a game of craps... it's entirely up to chance what a customer is going to buy. Sure, you might get J. P. Getty type come past your booth and wave his hand and buy up your entire booth, but more likely you'll get the guy next door who's looking for a $20.00 book that will fill a niche in his collection.  Nothing wrong with either end of the spectrum... it just means you have to have VARIETY (price and subject matter).

That's why I tend to go overboard with my boxes of books.

Ce la vie!

Hopefully it will be a good day. We'll see soon.

In the meantime, if you'd like to attend, let me know and I'll email a free pass.  If you're not able to or not interested in coming this time, I'll try and have a blog summary about it sometime next week.


See you there!