Sales, Expos, Festivals, & More
We try to cover it all, but inevitably, we fail. (Honestly: we just can't be everywhere at once!) So here's where we cheat and just give you links to other people's (super-helpful) pages. All hail to them!
(And, hey! Help us out! If you know of other useful event-listing sites, mail us at Editor@BookFairs.Com)
Library and other book sales, state by state, across America. Book Sale Finder's not the prettiest web site we've seen, but it's tremendously useful nonetheless. (And there's a mobile-friendly version of the site here.)
Literary festivals and book expos largely feature new books (unlike the antiquarian book fairs BookFairs.Com usually focuses on). These are events where author talks, signings, and round tables (and, sometimes: free books!) often mingle with live music, street food, and the great outdoors. We have our own (very subjective, far from comprehensive) list of literary and book festivals here, but Book Reporter provides information on a far greater number of North American literary festivals and book expos, both small and large.
These folks put us to shame! In addition to the major UK book fairs, they cover the smaller and regional British fairs, including "secondhand and antiquarian book fairs, ephemera and collectors fairs, charity and library book sales," and a whole lot more. (Oof. We're heading back to bed and assuming the fetal position...)
The IPA's listing of international book- and literary festivals and fairs (including a few antiquarian fairs) attempts to be comprehensive, and although they fall short, it's not by much, and we're awfully darn grateful they're there! So if you find yourself heading to Calcutta, Kazakhstan, or the Ivoiry Coast (or even just to London), make sure to check in here before you go!
Lit Hub is one of our favorite daily haunts, for pithy and quotable fiction and non-fiction excerpts and essays, for the best and most useful book reviews around, for keeping us up to speed with what's happening in the publishing industry, libraries, and bookstores, for the news of the day in books, and just for small doses of sanity and civility in our go-go-gogo world (it's that spoonful of sugar that helps the medicine go down!). And in case you're wondering why we've listed them here, they also do periodic reporting on book fairs!
The Curious Reader blog is a source of endless delights (and we recommend you bookmark it or add it to your RSS feed), but the link we've provided for you here is a short list of international fairs they particularly love (along with write-ups on just what makes each one so special). As wannabe curators (and wannabe travelers) ourselves, we'd be remiss if we didn't give props to them here!