Lost Opportunities--Festivals, Bloomsday

The only promise I kept to the customer on WHAD's Kathleen Dunn show about Bloomsday (June 16th) was that I'd be in stock of the book Ulysses. We actually had the classic edition from Vintage International and the annotated Ulysses from University of California. Missing? The Gabler edition with the updated text from 1961.

Here's the problem with the event--the natural tie-in or at least interest is with one of the universities (most likely UWM, being the largest and blocks away) and school is already over.

Our other promise was that we would have a table for each festival. However, we've already missed Pride Fest (well, we sort of had our Big Trips event as a tie in) and Polish Fest. I saw a checklist on one of our counters...

The good news is that Jason remembered to order in Summerfest, the commemorative book from two years ago. It's out of stock at the wholesalers so had we done it my way and waited until the first day of Summerfest (10 days starting June 25th), we couldn't have done it. Hurray for buyers!

Back to displays, we've hit the dead zone, really. In the spring, you have Mother's Day, Father's Day, and graduation, all of which sell books. Your outdoor cooking and summer reading displays start to look a bit stale, and though you may have some kids books, it's hard to find enough books for an adult Americana table--for Fourth of July I guess. I've brought in a lot of flag books over the years but the adult holiday books (see my posting on Halloween someday) are more hit than miss.

We really hoped we'd have a display schedule, leaving room for breaking events. There are so many things I thought I'd do but haven't (ooh, that's another blog posting, but maybe too embarrassing to actually post) that not putting together an display schedule seems relatively minor.