2008 National Book Festival

Holly, Sarah, and I went to our fourth annual Book Festival down on the Mall. This has become our favorite event in D.C., bar none. The Festival is conducted in two acts, one might say. Act 1 is where the authors give a presentation, read from their work, or just chat with participants at the genre pavilions. Sadly, we've never had time to attend any of those because we're always camped out in lines for Act II...the book signings. These lines can stretch out a long way. The line above was for Phillipa Gregory. Neil Gaimon once again took top honors for the longest line. He missed the Festival last year but was back this year with a scheduled three hour autograph session...unprecedented. The young lady in line ahead of us (above) told me that Gaimon was overheard to say that he would keep signing until they took the tent down around him...Neil is prolific AND fan friendly.

As a team, we snagged autographed books from Laura and Jenna Bush, Jan Brett, Brad Meltzer (my camera malfunctioned!), Paul Theroux (signing my book in the picture above), Neil Gaimon, Philippa Gregory, Walter Isaacson, and Jon Scieszka. I mulled over standing in line for Salmon Rushdie, but surprisingly his line was almost as bad as Neil's...and Donna reminded me that there was always the chance that some crazed fanatic hadn't heard that the fatwah was cancelled.

Odd about Jenna and Laura...this line moved the slowest due to security measures. You probably can't see it, but I put a red circle at the metal detector they were making everybody pass through. After about an hour and half, they suddenly gave up on this and everybody rushed forward, bypassing the detector and funneling into yet another line. The SS guys looked hard at us, made us all pile our backpacks to the side, and ran us down one last gated-funnel (you've seen cattle herded into pens, right?) and there was Jenna and Laura. They did at least look up every once in a while, but for the most part they had that "what in hell did we get ourselves into this time" look on their faces.
Was a really nice day...it only started raining as we're in our last line of the day. Books and rain don't go well together, so we rushed back to the car with our goodies. Aching backs, tired feet, sunburnt foreheads...great fun.