Readers, Merchants Bask in Growth of Book Festival

By ANDREW SIMONS

Staff Reporter

When 170,000 people descend on a major college campus, there’s usually a football game nearby.

Not at UCLA, where the Los Angeles Times-sponsored Festival of Books has grown in the last nine years to become the largest on-campus event, larger even than graduation.

The expanding popularity of the festival, to be held this year on April 24 and 25, has brought with it the pleasures and headaches that come when so many descend on a single place.

Last year, an estimated 150,000 people showed up, and area retailers and hoteliers are buoyed by the Times’ projections that this year’s event will bring 170,000 visitors.

“We do in two days the equivalent of good month,” said Sheldon McArthur, owner of the Mystery Bookstore on Broxton Avenue in Westwood Village. Last year, he said, the store posted $57,000 in sales during the two-day festival. This year he expects to do $65,000, more than 16 times the levels reached on a normal weekend.

“It is the most frantic and exhilarating weekend,” said McArthur. “We come out there exhausted and with sheer enthusiasm.”

Exhaustion seems to be the watchword for the weekend.

Glenn Geffcken, who for the last five years has orchestrated the event as senior project manager at the Los Angeles Times, oversees a two-person staff at the paper’s events department in the yearlong planning effort. “There’s a lot of cleanup and follow-up and bill-paying,” he said. “Then right after that, we start right in on the next year.”

In the weeks before the festival, Geffcken said, the detail work becomes a seven-day a week task.

In organizing the first festival for 1996, planners at the Times guessed an attendance of 25,000, said Steve Wasserman, editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review. “Three times that number arrived,” he said. “And since then the festival has grown by leaps and bounds.”

Low expectations

Attendance has increased in each of the last four years, from 90,000 in 2000 to 150,000 last year. “It takes time for an event to grow,” said Geffcken. “The event has been gradually building momentum.”

The Times operates the festival on a break-even basis, Geffcken said, though he would not specify what it generates in revenues. There are 400 booths, and while exhibitors are supposed to be charged $850, he said the Times does not get the maximum income.

“There’s a fair number that we comp, and non-profits don’t pay the full rate,” he said, adding that the balance is made up through advertising and sponsorship revenue.

Wasserman said the festival’s success contradicted those who “were skeptical that enough Angelenos would give up going to the beach and their weekend for books.”

The event has done much to belie the stereotype of the Los Angeles lightweight. “Actually, we view it very much as a literary city,” said Amy Burton, a publicist for New York-based HarperCollins Inc., a unit of News Corp.

At the request of several of its local authors including Francesca Lia Block, Julie Andrews, Clive Barker and Dean Koontz the publisher has taken a booth at the festival, Burton said.

More than 400 authors, including Ray Bradbury, Mitch Albom, Koontz, Anna Quindlen and Alice Walker are slated to attend the festival, touting their latest releases and giving readers a chance to meet their literary icons.

“I’ve always taken it very seriously. Steve Wasserman has done a terrific job,” said David Black, Albom’s New York-based agent. “It’s just a matter of reaching the reading public. It is equally important to reach the readers in New York, Miami, Los Angeles.”

Details matter

Reaching the public in Los Angeles, at least at a venue like the UCLA campus, proves to be a complex process.

Besides coordinating the appearances of the authors, anticipating the flow of more than 150,000 people and making sure all possible revenue sources are tapped, Geffcken has to contend with an open-air setting.

The comparably sized Comdex show, the annual technology expo held every November in Las Vegas, takes place in a convention center equipped with meeting rooms, indoor toilets, food service outlets and other necessities.

“When you do an event in a convention center, it’s designed for events there’s infrastructure in place,” Geffcken said. “We have to build the infrastructure. We have to figure out where phone lines are coming in, how power is coming in, how potable water is coming in for food sales and that sort of thing. Everything you use, you have to build and construct.”

That means hundreds of booths to assemble and thousands of signs to post, along with an army of staff to direct crowds.

About a week before the event, UCLA employees paid by the Times start putting together the infrastructure for the festival. Because the book show is held on state property, the Times is able to avoid the city permitting process.

Parking remains a major issue for the surrounding community, which has already seen strict limits placed on street parking around the campus. The festival takes all the lots on campus, a total of 125,000 spaces, along with access to an overflow parking lot in Westwood Village set to pick up the balance.

“We’ve been doing this for many years now,” said Nancy Greenstein, a spokeswoman for UCLA’s police department. “We have the routine well-rehearsed.”