Book 'em - 1994 American Booksellers Association trade show, Los Angeles, California emphasizes multiculturalism in publishing and innovations in books on computer - Column

National Review, July 11, 1994 by David Klinghoffer

There is a paradox at the heart of bookselling. Being a businessman, the owner of a bookstore ought to think like other businessmen. On the other hand, being part of the literary and academic worlds, he's often led in more fanciful directions. The result is a tension that, at this year's convention of the American Booksellers Association, popped up everywhere.

Over four days, 38,100 people gathered at the Convention Center in Los Angeles, wandering through four immense halls where publishers had set up booths and pavilions featuring next year's books. The point is to let bookshops start thinking about their upcoming orders. So in this sense serious business is conducted everywhere. But to get an idea of what booksellers really care about, you need to listen to what they say when they think they're among their own. And the topics, political and technological, that got serious attention demonstrate how lost in space the culture of bookselling really is.

You had to keep reminding yourself this was not the Modern Language Association. The titles of the panel discussions, which were going on several at a time at all hours, tell all: "Feminist Roundtable," "Gay/Lesbian Roundtable," "African-American Roundtable," "Evening with African-American Booksellers," "Literature of the [1992 L.A.] Rebellion," "Multicultural Publishing Update," and so on.

Talk of race and sex flowed everywhere but from the spigots in the Convention Center washrooms. No panel could gather without a quorum of disgruntled minority members, or white people who sought to swipe minority status from the minorities themselves. My favorite example of the former: the self-identified "Chicana and lesbiana" writer Cherrie Moraga, who berated Californians for failing to call their land "Atzlan," as the Aztecs did, and for refusing to pronounce Southwestern place names in the "authentic" Hispanic accent Miss Moraga favors: "Lohs Ahnhelays," "Nevahtha," "Tehhas." My favorite white person who wished to be otherwise: the novelist Carolyn See, who, on the same panel ("Los Angeles: My Literary Landscape"), complained in a jolly way that "as a person whose background is part Irish, part Scottish, and part English, it makes me feel funny being called |white.'"

And yet the booksellers listened with a polite seriousness that only partly concealed a lack of passionate interest in the thoughts of such as Miss Moraga. Like so many well-meaning people today, these folks view the Third World as medicine they must take, and a lot of it, no matter how unappealing. I realized this during a poignant stretch of time following a "book and author breakfast," where a writer called Ana Castillo (representing "the energetic and heady world of Chicana writing," as a press handout advertised) had spoken earnestly alongside Anna Quindlen, of the New York Times, and Michael Crichton, of Jurassic Park. Afterward, Miss Quindlen and Mr. Crichton were mobbed with questions from the audience, while nobody could think of anything to ask Miss Castillo. ("Now see here, precisely how heady is the world of Chicana writing?")

At any reference to unconventional sex, however, the conventioneers perked up - as for instance when heads jerked to attention at Walter Mosley's call for "more scenes, on television, of rectal bleeding in prison." It was during a discussion of "Murder, Mayhem, and the Media: Have We Gone Too Far?" and Mr. Mosley, President Clinton's favorite mystery writer, mentioned televised rectal bleeding as one way to scare kids and discourage them from doing things that might put them in jail.

Yes, I am still talking here about a booksellers convention. But in fact, at this ABA, books took second place to another form of communication: CD-ROM. If conventioneers weren't talking about multiculturalism or multi-sexualism, they were extolling the great promise of "electronic publishing." Computers were everywhere. In the past year, half the publishers seem to have launched electronic divisions.

At the center of the most expansive hall, the leading electronic publishing company, Voyager, set up its pavilion, and here eyes popped wider than at anything Walter Mosley said. The "product" is not an electronic "book" in the sense of a continuous text you sit down and read in order. To be sure, I met a woman on the Voyager publicity staff who claimed she had read all of Jane Austen's novels on a computer screen. When I asked to see a real book on a computer, she showed me Jurassic Park on a Mac Powerbook. Imagine looking at a little black-and-white dot-matrix screen for as ma hours as it would take you to read a four-hundred-page novel, and you'll have some notion of the way your eyes would rebel by, say, page twenty.

As compensation for the physical discomfort, the publicity person demonstrated special features: such as one where you hear simulated dinosaur growls by "clicking on" the name of the dinosaur as you reach it in the text. "Click," and a diminutive squeaking noise is emitted by the Powerbook. Voila! Tyrannosaurus rex!