L.A. Bookfest is Huge at USC

People who love books must have thought they’d died and gone to heaven at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books last weekend at USC.

I’m not sure it was biggest book festival of the year but there were an awfully lot of writers discussing their work, fielding questions and, of course, signing their books. Booths selling T-shirts, coffee mugs and every kind of book were scattered throughout the campus. There were 300 exhibit areas.

There seemed to be about 50 author panels going on Saturday, ten or twelve simultaneously. Sunday there were just as many. The ones featuring popular authors were sold out but it was possible to see some major stars if you got to the room on time, even without a ticket. Probably the hardest ticket to get was for the panel “Fiction: Breaking Boundaries” that featured Jennifer Egan. Her Pulitzer Prize for “A Visit from the Goon Squad” was announced just last month (after the programs were printed).

Mysteries writers included Southern California’s T. Jefferson Parker, in a panel discussing organized crime and Diane Mott Davidson’ in one called “A Question of Character.”

Four representatives from the business side of books spoke on “Publishing in the 21st Century.” The discussion was lively and well controlled by moderator Sara Nelson. The topic of eBooks was naturally discussed. Although the audience seemed hostile to the “Nook and Kindle” trend, the four experts were not against the technology, rather considering the eBook just another way of delivering books to readers.

Surprisingly in this economy, Norton Publishing is doing great business and is expanding and hiring editors, according to editor Robert Weil. He mentioned, not surprisingly, that authors now need a FaceBook presence and a Twitter following to boost their name recognition and bolster sales. Cary Goldstein editor-in-chief and publisher at “Twelve” reassured the audience that some small publishers still take their time and support their authors. The house publishes only twelve titles a year.

We missed Lisa See in a panel called “Worlds in Transition” no doubt talking about Los Angeles in the 30s. (The Highland Reading Group just finished reading “Shanghai Girls” in April.) We did get to hear Jonathan Rabb discussing his 1936 Berlin noir trilogy that includes “The Second Son.” “Fritz Lang (the German film director) brought ‘noir’ to Hollywood” Rabb announced to the overflow crowd.

All in all, an enjoyable afternoon, although traffic jams at Kellogg Hill and in East LA made a 1½ hour trip closer to 3 hours. Traffic in LA. If you can't beat it, join it. All these writers did.

“It is a truth universally acknowledged…” I thought to myself as we passed “The Jane Austen Society of North America” exhibit "...that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a book contract."


Library Corner
By John Grimm

This post will appear in the
May 6, 2011 edition of the
Highland Community News in
Highland California

George Washington Carver

In addition to being Black History Month, February is National Inventors Month. So who better to feature this week than the brilliant Black scientist and inventor George Washington Carver.

Born at the end of the Civil War, he began his formal education at the age of twelve in a one-room schoolhouse in Missouri. College was nearly impossible for Black Americans in the South but at the age of thirty he gained acceptance to Simpson College in Iowa, where he was the first black student.

The college did not offer science classes so Carver had to study piano and art. But his true love was science. He later transferred to Iowa Agricultural College in 1891, where he gained a Bachelor of Science degree in 1894 and a Master of Science degree in bacterial botany and agriculture in 1897.

He went on to become a member of the faculty there teaching classes about soil conservation. In 1897, Booker T. Washington, founder of the Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute for Negroes, convinced Carver to come south and serve as the school's Director of Agriculture.

At Tuskegee Carver developed his crop rotation method, which revolutionized southern agriculture. He educated the farmers to alternate the soil-depleting cotton crops with soil-enriching crops such as; peanuts, peas, soybeans, sweet potatoes, and pecans. Many southern farmers followed his suggestions and helped the region, devastated by years of civil war, to recover. He changed the South from being a one-crop land of cotton, to being multi-crop farmlands, with farmers having hundreds of profitable uses for their new crops according to the website About.com.

Carver also worked at developing industrial applications from agricultural crops. He produced dyes of 500 different shades of dye and he was responsible for the invention in 1927 of a process for producing paints and stains from soybeans. For that he received three separate patents. In 1939, he received the Roosevelt medal for restoring southern agriculture. Carver remained on the faculty at Tuskegee until his death in 1943.

During Black History Month we should recognize Black Americans for their contributions to industry, business and science. Look for displays, books and bookmarks at your schools and local library.

-This first appeared in the Feb 11, 2011 issue of the Highland Community News, Highland, Ca