“End of an era!“ writes a colleague from London when the news hit:

https://publishingperspectives.com/2020/12/reedpop-cancels-new-yorks-bookexpo-bookcon-retiring-the-event-permanently-covid19/

“No more dinners, dancing, or fun, ever again, anywhere, any more…”

“Oh, sad,” I responded. “What times we’ve had!”

I remember the BEA show in Miami in 1994, the heady elation after the first day of our Internet Start-up Booth. It was overrun by curious publishers wondering what this internet thing was all about. So exciting I couldn’t sleep! A friend was crashing in my hotel room with me, and we hung out on the balcony over South Beach all night, making lists of all the business cards and leads. And Chicago a few years later, when OBS had a booth in the New Media Hall, miles away from the main action, online pioneers surrounded by CD stands with shiny discs hanging from the ceiling, featuring more pornography than educational applications. O’Reilly sold its internet browser to AOL that spring for millions of dollars. And a leading library ebook supplier offered OBS a deal: he would stay out of online publishing, if we left the CD market to his company. It didn’t quite work out that way.

Then there was Vegas in the late ‘90s where one publisher brought along Ken Kesey’s psychedelic bus with “FURTHER” painted on the front, promoting his new book, and Ingram threw a party at the Shark Club, where Roomful of Blues played to a packed dance floor. Or LA, where the neighborhood around the convention center was too dangerous to walk in at night, so all the hospitality parties happened in the convention hotels. The Chicago Fair of 2016 was the turning point, though, the last one we exhibited at. Its sparse crowds wandered through a cavernous and too quiet hall, and the long Memorial Day weekend did indeed seem very long.

The BEAs of the ‘80s were massive affairs, with multiple halls hosting, in addition to many, many book publishers presenting their Fall lists to the bookstores, all the suppliers as well — typesetters, printers, paper manufacturers, and makers of bookstore “sides” like calendars and coffee machines. I used to love going to the small, independent presses hall, where one year, someone handed me a free copy of “The Emperor Wears No Clothes,” published by Last Gasp Publishing Co. in San Francisco. This 8-1/2 X 11, hand-typed book told how pot was historically an essential pillar of the US economy back in the 1700s, when every landowner had to grow acres of hemp as a patriotic duty, and supply it  to the government for the making of sails, rope, clothing, etc. The topic seemed so radical back then, when people were going to jail for that very act of growing a weed. And now the clock has moved forward and it’s legit once again, both growing and publishing about hemp. So maybe, just maybe, there is room for hope and optimism about the book publishing industry coming back into its own one future day, at least as far as convening in person is concerned, in cities around the world. Perhaps book shows will reemerge in the coming ‘20s in a new form, while we still have life in us to meet, negotiate, learn, socialize, and, best of all, when day is done, sit down with our friends and colleagues, for leisurely, face-to-face dinners, when we can spend the whole night talking, arguing, laughing, and plan for future books.  I mean, it doesn’t just END, does it?