What is the cover of a book if not a marketing tool? Whoever claimed that we should not judge a book by its cover has never been to a book exhibit. The foremost showcase for books in my field, until 2020, was the annual conference. And the only space where you needed to flash your name tag to get in.
The book exhibit is not just a place to look at books. It’s also a place to meet people, pitch projects with editors, and cruise the aisles, surveying the latest publications. The exhibit has a particular rhythm. During the days, authors and editors huddle together. By the late afternoon, newly published authors and their press held wine and cheese in the late afternoon, clutches of people who toast the author. On the last day of the conference, press representatives hawk their books at steeply discounted rates—ten dollars, five dollars, even giveaways—to shed the weight of their bags before returning home and awaiting the next conference book exhibit.
As with so many things, this lovely ritual had to pivot. Conferences are now virtual and so are book exhibits. Book launches are no longer polite wine and cheese events next to a publisher’s booth or more rowdy events at a bar just a short walk from the conference hotel. They are webinars, not celebratory events. The book has to do a different kind of work at a virtual event. It cannot declare its presence as an object in the world; it must now signify ideas.
This shift in presentation makes me wonder about the value of the book cover. In the book exhibits of yore, book covers enticed potential readers. Their images and titles beckoned. Their collective presentation signaled shifts in the discipline and invoked new sensibilities. If the biggest crowds as at the lobby bar, the next busiest place was the conference book exhibit.
Unlike a library, the display of books escaped the tyranny of keyword searches or the Library of Congress classification system. Those of us who wander among the stacks of university libraries do so with a specific destination, a call number. We may be curious about the surrounding books, which promise conceptual relatedness. But that relatedness is precisely why the book exhibit holds so much pleasure for book readers. The university presses did not heed an early twentieth-century view of the world (e.g., the Library of Congress call number system was invented in 1897). They instead laid out the future direction of the discipline as captured by the book covers on display.
We would stroll from booth to booth, surveying the new publications, picking up brochures that advertised enticing discounts for conference-goers. Some publishers even laid out the galley proofs of forthcoming books.
The magic of the exhibition was in the display of books—covers turned outward in full view. Some presses even created enlarged versions of the book covers to solicit passers-by. Of course, there were stacks of books, reminders that these books were not objects to admire but products to be sold. While presses mail out full-color brochures and emails to their lists, nothing quite compared to strolling around the book exhibit.
In this sense, the book exhibit resembled the arcade as described by Walter Benjamin. The arcade escapes from the unity of a conceptual apparatus like the Library of Congress classification system. Nothing organized the books at the exhibit but their publisher, the recent date of publication, and their proximity to anthropological themes, at least those of the book-writing sort of anthropologist. The book exhibit offered up a world of possibility, too often foreclosed by electronic searches that depend on keyword searches and the shelves of libraries organized by the Library of Congress classification system.
University Library Stacks
The first time I bothered to search for my first book on a library shelf, I was stunned. Its location was several stacks away from where I usually pulled books. It was not among books on anthropology but ones on monetary policy. “It’s in the wrong place,” I exclaimed to a colleague, the social sciences librarian. He gently explained that he couldn’t move the book. Its place was now a permanent location based on its call number. I was crushed. My book was related by topic, but not in spirit.
There is an immense apparatus behind what appears to be the ordinary act of shelving a book. Each book is assigned a Library of Congress call number, even in advance of its printing to facilitate cataloging and processing.
Unlike the conference book exhibit, university library books are shelved with only their title and call number visible. So now my book is tucked among others that explain monetary policies in Southeast Asia. My book shall remain among its neighbors, each examining a facet of monetary policy in Asia.
Post-pandemic exhibits
While I sing the praises of the book exhibition at scholarly conferences, I know it will emerge in a new form in the post-pandemic world. And that’s a good thing. Job interviews, once conducted in cordoned-off spaces at the basement of the convention center, or worse, a hotel room, are now held online. Book launches as webinars are accessible worldwide, not just the lucky few with institutional funds to attend the conference. And books are publicized by podcasts like newbooksnetwork.com where the author’s voice, not the book’s cover, serves to introduce the ideas and arguments. Even book reviews, once contained in journals, are now published online, allowing for a broader readership
Perhaps even acquisitions editors are relieved. After all, they no longer have the chore of hauling books from one conference venue to the next. Many of the onlookers may not be book buyers, just lurkers. My purchases came in waves, sometimes spurred by a sense of excitement for the field that had less to do with the exhibition and more to do with where I was in writing.
I look back fondly on the book exhibit, an arcade of ideas and images and words that momentarily stood as the state of the field for books in anthropology. And I look forward to seeing what will take its place.
