BookExpo America Announces Final Attendance for 2002
Attendance figures for BookExpo America, held from May 1-5 at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center in New York City, were announced on May 9.
The final total attendance figure was 31,726. Convention officials note that this number includes 2,167 day badges, which were not available at the convention in Chicago in 2001. Total attendance without the day passes in 2002 was 29,559. Total attendance last year in Chicago was 21,898.
An average 11 percent square-footage increase in 2001 to New England Booksellers Association stores can be interpreted several ways, but, as executive director Rusty Drugan said of the latest survey, "This expansion does speak to the fact that business may be better. And it certainly speaks to the confidence of the store owners."
On the surface, Marcus Stevens’s new novel, The Curve of the World (Algonquin), is an adventure novel. A New York businessman is stranded in the Congolese rainforest, desperately running from a rogue militia, all the while trying to survive a cruel and unknown environment. But dig deeper, and Stevens’s first novel is about the human mind, and how our own perceptions can create or remake the world in which we live.
In Gracefully Insane: The Rise and Fall of America’s Premier Mental Hospital (PublicAffairs), a Book Sense 76 May/June title, Alex Beam tells the story of McLean Hospital, refuge of the rich, famous, and deeply troubled for almost two centuries. McLean is a mental hospital-cum-luxurious estate set in acres of rolling New England parkland just outside Boston. The picturesque asylum also looms large in the American imagination.