Behind the Tents

The above is what Street Fair looks like from a bricks & mortar perspective. Not very inviting, is it? The Fair, as you can see puts its back to us every year. Crowds of determined punters mill up and down the middle of the block in search of family fun: listening to buskers and bands, getting free spinal adjustments, eating kettle-corn, meat-on-sticks, and whatnot, and buying the handicrafts of the booth-holders. For those of us that front the sidewalks, there's not much to be done by way of participation. Oh, a few of the resident merchants put out a table or two, offer a special discount the days of, or string a bit of bunting over their doors, but realistically, there's not much that can be said for our sales when only the parking lots and the public bathrooms are full. Otherwise, the action is elsewhere. Once, a coworker and I made the experiment of putting some books, knickknacks and T shirts on a table and took a couple of chairs and a cashbox out with us to spend the day. The weather was pleasant enough that year, even in the shade. All that could be said for the day, frankly. Another time, a few of us went up and down the street with one-time-only-discount-coupons. That did a little better, but could hardly be said to have justified the number of irritable babies in strollers in the lobby, or the lines of cranky tourists in the neighborhood complaining of the "shocking condition" of the ladies' loo after a few hundred of their fellow Fairgoers had trouped through.

As one might imagine, Street Fair, when it rolls around every year, at least for those of us working in the bookstore that weekend, is not the happiest of occasions. I personally don't have much use for it, as you may have figured out already. (Even my eight dollar BBQ sandwich was indigestible this year.)

Working at the Used Books Buying Desk on Saturday, I was as always amazed to find more than a few single-minded individuals show up with books to sell, crowds, road-blocks and chiropractors be damned. Most of course simply forgot or did not know that they'd picked a most inconvenient day to try to sell a bag of grandma's mysteries or last year's book club selections. I was of course perfectly happy to see such sellers who came. Almost always glad to see people come to the desk with books to sell me. And, it gave me a good excuse to not direct folks upstairs to the restrooms for a minute or two. That was a pleasant respite.

As for sales, I wouldn't know until I see the figures, but while there were unnaturally large crowds in the joint, I should say we saw about the same number of shoppers as might be on a gloomy Spring day. Maybe less. Certainly not more. Can't imagine there were more.

I don't mean to grouse, or begrudge anyone their good time, or their lumpy new vase, or framed photograph of Mount Rainier. Even with, so far as I can see, no direct benefit to the bookstore's bottom-line, it isn't a bad thing to have all these people in the neighborhood on a weekend. Whatever the mess they leave, or the noise they make, it does the neighborhood some good to have folks see it looking festive and friendly. Ours is an area of the city so completely identified with the university now that there are lots of locals who seem to think there really is no other reason to be there. Not true, of course. There are the usual college bars and inexpensive restaurants, but there are also some unique shops, a lovely old movie theater, live music, and yes, bookshops, still, including the finest general bookstore in the city, if I do say so myself.

Still, I confess, every year this wall of tent-flaps out the front windows makes me cranky. I feel no more connection to what goes on out there than to the annoying annual fly-over from the Blue Angels that rattles the glass for an hour or two, come the boating season, I think. Nothing to do with me.

This festival also reminds me, every single year, how this kind of celebration, presumably meant as a promotion of the "local" tends to attract, well, as much bad barbecue from who knows what corner of the primitive South, as it does locals to and from the local businesses. Where exactly is the neighborhood in all of this? Also, I am deeply suspicious of the class of artistic white bohemians who caravan from street fair to street fair, from county fair to flea market, hawking their hand-carved harps and resin jewelry, their comic mugs and patch hats. I don't say they don't deserve their livelihood. They pay for their booths and they takes their chances. They aren't quite carnies, but they still have that lingering atmosphere of the fly by night, the nearly not, and the entirely too temporary to quite be true.

About this, it seems, I may be wrong. A friend and fellow employee of the bookstore stopped by early to the desk on his way elsewhere and told me he'd just seen the man who delivers the Fritos to the branch store where my friend works. It seems the Fritos delivery man, and his lovely lady wife, are both local photographers and every year they buy a booth-space, set up shop at the Street Fair, and sell their admirable pictures of the local scenery. Good on them, I say. What it's all meant to be about, really. I'm a little ashamed to think I was so suspicious.

That lemonade stand, after all, one of 'em anyway, seems to be raising money for something or other hereabouts.

Ignore grouchy old me. Enjoy. Hopefully, we'll see you again sometime. Maybe next Saturday, you know, in the bookstore, buying a book. Stranger things have happened. So, have a good time at the Street Fair, folks.

Just avoid the brisket.

Selling it on the Street

Years ago, in San Francisco, I found a young woman who made and sold hats. She had a booth at the Castro Street Fair. She was named Martha and she called her little business, "Martha Made It." I bought three, four, as many as half a dozen of her little knit caps. That was twenty years ago or more. I still have three of the hats I bought from her, the other having sadly been lost through the years. I've since looked for her and any sign of her business on the Internet, but Martha and her caps would seem to have vanished.

That purchase was one of the few of anything but food that I've ever made at a fair. I do not much like fairs. When I was a child, we had county fairs and Grange fairs and these had all the charm of novelty for their time and place. I discovered that there was money to be made from entering art contests, talent shows and the like and worked at these, going so far as to enlist my friends to act as fronts so that I might enter multiple drawings and paintings, dividing my winnings with the kids whose names I'd used. This brilliant scheme was undone when, at the Mercer County Grange Fair, prizes in real money were given over entirely to useless ribbons. You can not imagine my outrage at the discovery that a blue ribbon was to be my only reward, or my disgust when a friend under whose name I had entered multiple contests seemed thrilled to accept such useless stuff, earned or not. As the whole enterprise was of necessity secret, I could hardly complain. I date my dislike of fairs to that disappointment. But my dislike has grown since, not from disappointed greed, but from a dislike of both crowds and artisan gimcrackery: heavy pots, insipid landscapes, vulgar blown glass, clunky lawn ornaments and the like. There is nothing at this city's street fairs that interests me now but fried dough, in its many varieties, visiting barbecue and roast corn stands, and the passing parade of humanity. That I could watch all day, so long as I was supplied with a sufficient stock of fresh lemonade and frankfurters.

There's nothing to match the first airing of Spring limbs in Seattle on a surprisingly sunny day. The natives hereabouts are a calendrical people, undaunted by actual weather, and when May comes 'round, rain and cold be damned, they dress as if for a day at a Mexican beach. Pink-kneed, bare limbed, and shod in open-toed sandals, the people of Seattle will brave wind-chills, thunder storms, even hail to welcome Persephone back from The Land of the Dead. When we are blessed, as we were this year, with an actual warm day, with sunshine and clear skies, the press of humanity at such events as the just passed University District Street Fair resembles nothing so much as a riot, though a peculiarly respectable, pale sort of riot I'll admit. Blinking and bustling in the sun, the happy crowds wait patiently at every open street crossing, queue politely for overpriced meat on a stick, drink their beer at designated dinning areas, seem seldom to fight, dance or piss in the alleys, instead lining up, seemingly in their hundreds, to use the restrooms at the bookstore.

Now, other than allowing the use of the facilities, the bookstore has never, to my knowledge, taken any active role in the Street Fair. Among the store's employees, the event has taken on an unhappy reputation as a source of naught but chaos, mess and bad sales. Bad tempered babies in strollers crowd the lobby, already done with the whole business by ten in the morning. Ladies unknown to us but once a year have the audacity, at six in the evening, to complain of the state of the restrooms. Frozen custard and the tag-ends of various suspicious things wrapped in wet napkins are abandoned or dropped throughout the sales floor. Our trash cans are left brimming with garbage generated elsewhere. It can be a very trying day to work in the bookstore.

This year though, my coworker K. took it upon herself to bring the bookstore out into the street. For the first time in anyone's memory of the 40 year history of the Street Fair or the more than 100 year history of the bookstore, we set up a table outside and decorated it with books, a few sidelines, and some new T-shirts, produced specifically to promote the bookstore as an independent. The table was staffed by good and patient women who sat in such shade as they could find and greeted such passersby as hesitated long enough to be greeted on their way in to find the restrooms. A few books were in fact actually sold, much to our collective amazement, though that was not really the point. The point was simply to be out there, to remind that press of Spring flesh that they were passing by, in and out of one of the great bookstores in the history of this city.

To further this goal, some coworkers and I spent part of that same day passing out coupons up and down the busy street, good for fifty percent off the purchase of a single used book in the bookstore. K. and others did the same again on Sunday for the second day of the fair. The response to this was extremely encouraging. I have not myself handed out fliers or the like since the far off days of my first political activism in San Francisco. I dislike being approached in this way myself, so it was with some hesitation I undertook to be one of the people distributing these coupons. But it turned out to be a rather wonderful way to spend an hour or two of my day. True, the vast majority of people turned my coupon politely aside, but many, hearing that it was for the bookstore, turned back and took one from me. Time after time I was told how wonderful the bookstore is by people I have never seen in the bookstore in the better than five years I've worked there. Better yet, many of the people who took the coupon later used it to purchase a used book, most buying more than just the one discounted. Many, many of that day's customers expressed surprise and satisfaction in having by this means only just learned that we are in the used books business.

The street fair was then, thanks largely to K., a greater success for us than we might ever have anticipated. Used books owe her special thanks, as few other efforts at promotion seem to have been so immediately successful in increasing the awareness of this newish stock in the bookstore. And I owe her thanks for giving me so good an excuse for strolling through the crowd and gathering more smiles than frowns. There were some handsome sights among the general run of walkers. And the roasted corn was delicious this year.