"Have Book, Will Travel"

...But this wasn’t what I wished to discuss with Theroux...

...She had never heard of him...

...The fact that I was in Chicago was no excuse for my choice of reading...

...But all day long the evening reading gives us a sense of purpose, a handy response to Bruce Chatwin’s ever-present “what am I doing here...

...A 1923 Rolls-Royce sat in front of Sneaky Pete’s...

...the “Field of Dreams” in Dyersville...

...I thought of all the people who had said “Huh...

...I was scheduled to appear with a professor of Buddhism who had written a book about the religion and his experiences teaching it in Cambodia...

...After verifying that I had correctly identified in it his final resting place...

...people don’t want to be transported to the homegrown...

...It was an impressive performance, and a long one, as the coauthor, her husband, hadn’t been able to make the trip and she took the time allotted to (at least) two speakers...

...It was good preparation, which I wouldn’t have gotten in a chauffeured limo, for the Printers Row Book Fair...

...So, unburdened by illusions and still out of the house, travel writers are the happiest authors on tour...

...When the hour-long program was over, a number of people came up to chat (it was me or nothing...

...Everybody’s carrying about 15 extra pounds right now,” Carlos Cumpian, a local Chicano writer, explained to me as we sipped iced tea at a sidewalk caf...

...Lesser would-be officials speckled the balcony...

...The only possible trauma of a book tour is the potential encounter with apathy: The empty chairs of a ghostly chain at the short end of a mall in a town without pity...

...Theroux had asked her incredulously...

...It occurred to me that writers’ concerns about the decline of reading stem from more than just a self-preservation instinct...

...The percentage of women at a ball game is no doubt comparable to the percentage of men at a book fair...

...You don’t have to read me, but read so you can talk to me...

...Eventually I took the podium, and read a short section in a voice of controlled hurt...

...Congratulations...

...We don’t see what novelists find so objectionable about a diet of fine hotels, especially when the rooms all come reserved and generously paid for...

...she said, slowing her pace but not coming to a stop...

...There are no prestigious workshops, or covetous magazine assignments, or Pulitzers for readers...

...I had never been to the heartland...

...On Sunday, I woke up well before my 2:30 presentation...

...Once again I went last, after another dramatic reading, this one by a young Hispanic woman who used not just her voice but her body to evoke a night of rumba in Havana...

...Chicagoans look their best in October—after the summer, and before they’ve had their Halloween candy...

...Didn’t your parents read to you when you were a child...

...My fellow Americans, as your next president I will ensure that every working man and woman receives one month of vacation a year...

...And in that easy familiarity of boarding house breakfasts, they asked about me...

...One was a boy, no older than 14, who gave me my book to be signed and then, just as endearingly, his hand to be shaken...

...So, you’re an author...

...During the lull a large portion of the audience, either having seen what they’d come for or believing the session now over, got up and walked out, heartlessly passing in front of me as they went...

...Minutes later he brought me my buffalo burger, which I washed down with a glass jar of beer...

...But they’re not travel writers flying coach with their first paperback...

...The thing about great cities is that they have enough people to go around...

...She walked by, trailing her husband and two children...

...they are tied, as well, to the nearly-as-powerful need to connect...

...That night I cut my ties with the chain motels...

...I will convince the manufacturers of suitcases to come up with a new black...

...My panel, probably because it contained two Texans, was put in the House Chamber...

...They were, he said, “like the early Christians, gathering in tents...

...Afterwards, I signed three books and then looked on as the line, made up almost entirely of comely young women, grew in front of the professor’s table...

...Tell a writer you write and depression sets in...

...I will approve discounts on Prozac for flight attendants...

...At least not in parking lots...

...The moderator, inexplicably at a loss, made no announcement...

...Then I remembered that I was a travel writer and I did what travel writers do: I left...

...And many people, moved either by a brush with celebrity or a bout of sympathy, will buy a book if they’ve met the author...

...He had flattered his audience, comprising of about 200 people (in a city of three million), congratulating them for being readers...

...He told of talking to a young woman recently, a college graduate, and mentioning a book by Robert Louis Stevenson...

...The Arkansas Literary Festival in Little Rock hosted a blacktie gala that included a postprandial game of “Name That Tome” (my team lost to Roy Blount Jr.’s...

...I searched in vain for the black-and-white Hawaiian shirt of Paul Theroux, whom I had listened to in an airless tent a few hours earlier...

...We cut them off customers,” the bartender told me, before mentioning that Buffalo Bill Cody had been born in Le Claire (somehow I had missed the town on that first trip...

...Each had seemed a kind of glittery reward for the cloistered life which every author could treat as a personal celebration...

...cummings, Langston Hughes, and Sherwood Anderson to town...

...On Saturday afternoon, crowds of nonfrequent flyers grazed the book tents on Dearborn Street...

...In Austin, the Texas Book Festival featured breakfast at the governor’s mansion and a dinner and dance band Saturday evening...

...I am even smaller—which, to the bestseller pashas, probably sounds as uplifting as a solo honeymoon...

...The young woman behind me announced that she had come to see the Red Sox play, in a rare Wrigley Field appearance, while two other women talked excitedly about the Blues Festival...

...All writers were readers first, and most continue their lives as more prolific readers than writers...

...The vote in the House was clear: I had carried Texas...

...A visiting professor of mathematics, in fact, occupied the room next to mine...

...Downstairs, Paul Ingram talks books like the one-man literary society he is...

...About 50 people filled the chairs, while a blessed handful stood in the back...

...the limestone buildings of Grant Wood’s old artists’ colony in Stone City—everything connected by rolling fields of tall green corn...

...Panels...

...My reading was hosted by a local radio personality and carried live on WSUI...

...And if it turns out to be a wash, there’s always the sympathetic staff to chat with, and pump for local color...

...An author at a signing is like a picture at an exhibition—passively open to public scrutiny, ridicule, approval, dismissal, avoidance...

...I had envisioned a man who brought a bemused detachment to the huzza of the marketplace, so I was relieved when he seemed as concerned about sales and publicity as I was...

...In Chicago, for whatever reason, authors felt no need to congregate...

...As are all readings at Prairie Lights, giving them an unexpected air of import...

...It is only on a book tour that we stand front and center...

...I watched the agonizing faces of friends who stayed to lend their support and thereby magnified my humiliation by being witnesses to it...

...The book fair took place one week before the presidential election...

...At least they say they will...

...In Miami, I had followed the author of a book about her multicultural neighborhood in Queens...

...I know because I’ve played the part...

...Where you staying...

...Iowa taught me a valuable lesson of travel, or at least travel writing: Often, the less glamorous the destination, the more rewarding the journey...

...when I had told them where I was going next...

...And I sat there struck (once again) by the limitless riches of the road—in 15 minutes I had found four travel stories, that of a biker B&B being almost as marvelous as that of the future Eurasian road racers—and also by the brute similarities between the lodging and the publishing industries...

...He and his friend had left New Hampshire and were on their way to Montana for a little fly-fishing...

...Hundreds of neckties hung from the ceiling of the dining room...

...I flew to Des Moines, rented a car, and discovered a miscellany of intimate Americana: the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, where Buddy Holly, Richie Valens, and the Big Bopper gave their last performance...

...Black-and-white photographs of them and others decorate the walls...

...Which is why I remember with such awe and affection the young woman in Dubuque...

...Used books were more a part of the Printers Row Book Fair than of the other fairs I’d been to...

...The unassuming locale carried a certain appeal which apparently only I appreciated, as almost no other authors attended...

...And as a meaningful way of life, Buddhism will always surpass support for the White Sox...

...tell a writer you read and gratitude blossoms...

...The sun disappeared as Copland’s “Red Pony” played on the radio...

...he asked...

...The majority of readers are female, of course, just as the majority of sports fans are male...

...But sometimes he is simply an information source for a customer looking for the latest Palahniuk...

...I wanted to ask him why he ignored my book, which my blurb-seeking publisher had sent him, after choosing one of the chapters for The Best American Travel Writing 2001...

...I will make any hotel with attitude host a weekly Rotary Club luncheon...

...I walked out of the book fair, picked up my rental car, and pointed it towards Iowa...

...When she finally finished, and the lights came back on, a crew appeared to dismantle her audio and visual aids...

...Those sensitive souls who flaunt their lack of social skills are as pathetic as people who boast that they are bad at math...

...The next morning I stopped in Anamosa to visit Grant Wood’s grave, leaving a postcard of my book with the woman in the Chamber of Commerce office...

...Literature, like French, has ceased to be the lingua franca for the socalled educated crowd...

...I carried my plate of hummus and bruschetta and sat down at a table of secondhand booksellers...

...I will pass through Congress a bill mandating that any passengers who fail to fit their carry-on bags into the overhead compartment on the first try must turn said bags over to a flight attendant and, before landing, write letters of apology to all the people seated in rows higher than their own...

...When my collection of travel stories came out in paperback, I traveled to the Midwest to revisit some of the places that appear in the book...

...Our culture has no accepted etiquette for dealing with writers sitting alone with their books...

...A book tour provides us with a focus, not always a given in our all-over-the-map trade...

...Especially now, in the Blog Age, when it seems that more people want to write than to read (not realizing that you need to read in order to write anything that is worth reading, or hasn’t already been written...

...A Silver Ghost...

...The difference being, of course, that the author perceives and registers (or, frequently, tries not to register) the reactions she inspires...

...Some memoirists manq?es have wandered into the field, and appropriated place as nothing more than a scenic backdrop to the more important story of themselves...

...Out at the Super 8? That’s too bad...

...People bring to the experience, even in large cities, no helpful guidelines or learned behaviors...

...Just across the Mississippi a Super 8 Motel sign pierced the gloaming...

...B&Bs, it was clear, give go-it-alone book tour authors not only a warm feeling of solidarity but also an excellent opportunity for self-promotion...

...It was a self-guided tour—my publisher is small...

...Though it was a good walk from the university, you could still imagine professors heading off in the morning to disseminate knowledge...

...Thanks be to college towns with famous writers’ workshops...

...I was ambivalent about panels, not just because the audience is doubled for your potentially one-bettered performance, but because they had produced, at previous fairs, my greatest public debacle as a writer, and my finest hour...

...We are puzzled by the memoirists’ complaint about living out of a suitcase because to us it’s infinitely preferable to living in the past...

...In the morning we were joined at table by an innkeeping couple from Minneapolis...

...No one,” Paul Theroux once wrote, “has ever accused me of traveling with a theme...

...at Prairie Lights (independent booksellers get the same professional courtesy as B&Bs) informs customers that they are on the site of the old literary society, The Times Club, that brought Robert Frost, Carl Sandburg, e.e...

...I dropped my bags in my room and headed into Le Claire...

...Not to mention the most symmetrical...

...During the winter they’re able to hide it under coats...

...True, that position is difficult to define—not to mention enjoy—in an empty store...

...At the Miami Book Fair there had been a cocktail party in a downtown office tower which most of the featured authors attended...

...A sign in the upstairs caf...

...We were taken to a small classroom where about 20 people sat...

...She had brought slides, recordings, and her sizable talents as an actress and mimic, recreating accents that ranged from street black to Ukrainian immigrant...

...A signing in Dubuque is not a journey into the heart of darkness...

...This time I read first, from my chapter on Comiskey Park, and then the professor read about Cambodia—two subjects that quite possibly had never been paired...

...A woman with short brown hair and dirty fingernails told me, too, that many older, even middle-aged, secondhand booksellers (middle-aged and secondhand— a dire combination in the country of the next new thing) gave up on book fairs because of the physical labor involved...

...In Chicago, I met the professor of Buddhism in the authors’ lounge...

...But this is the inevitable result when a culture prizes self-expression over learning...

...For ten long minutes I not only encountered apathy, I also watched its opposite turn its perfumed back to me...

...And probably never should be again...

...Yes,” I said...

...Some may give the impression, often by their wardrobes, that they’d be much more content sharing gourds of gazelle blood with Masai tribesmen, but don’t believe them...

...To travel is to be continually reminded of the growing homelessness of the written word...

...Thomas Swick, travel editor of the South Florida Sun-Sentinel, is the author, most recently, of A Way to See the World: From Texas to Transylvania with a Maverick Traveler...

...Ignoring the lessons of Chicago, I read about Iowa, though I ended with some helpful travel advice for runaway brides (inspired by the memory of a town that embraces drifters) and a soliloquy on the beauty of unsung places...

...But for this, too, travel writers are much better prepared...

...The franchises—Super 8, David Sedaris—get prominent placement along the highway and just inside the door (and with it ever-increasing business), while the little guys—the B&Bs and midlist authors (while often charming, and full of personality)—fight a losing battle tucked away on side streets and back shelves where they are invisible to all except those who specifically seek them out...

...And, needless to say, we don’t quite grasp the horror of going out and meeting readers...

...A stood-up author still beats a doubting travel writer, especially when they’re one and the same...

...I’ve got a B&B,” and he handed me a card for the Hog Heaven Bed & Breakfast...

...the National Hobo Convention in nearby Britt...

...From our hours spent in airports we know that most Americans, when presented with large chunks of free time and removed from demanding home entertainment systems, will still find almost any excuse—a cell phone, a laptop, another bag of chips—not to pick up a book...

...And the focus, in another pleasing twist, is us...

...That’s my car,” said one of the two men sitting at the bar...

...In 2007, he said, they were going to ship the car to China and then drive it in the Beijing-Paris rally...

...It’s not just that we have bigger trips to fry, we have fewer bones to pick...

...Applause rang through the chamber...

...Friendly staff made like a grounds crew and swiftly moved my table out of the caf...

...In Austin, things worked out differently...

...Travel writers are, by nature, in search of the other—which, by definition, is not oneself...

...Ultimately, there is a lot of heavy lifting in literature...

...That night’s reading in Dubuque was turned into a signing as the space before the microphone remained dishearteningly vacant...

...As viewers of Book-TV know, readings at the Texas Book Festival take place in the state capitol...

...The shuttle from Midway buzzed with raves for warring weekend attractions...

...In Iowa City, I found a handsome bed and breakfast in the middle of a leafy academic street...

...We tend not to enter MFA programs, teach at universities, or live in New York City, so we are in constant touch with the great unread...

...Front and center once again...

...It is the written equivalent of a room in which everyone is talking and nobody is listening, particularly to the dead...

...I was looking forward to my first trip to the state since 1992...

...This was a disappointment...

...and into the center aisle...

...The three of us looked out from our hillock over a plush plain of leather swivel chairs, all of them occupied by make-believe legislators...

...One of the sellers said there used to be even more secondhand stalls, before the chain bookstores became involved and inevitably changed the character of the fair...

...That also was an election year, and as in every election year, commentators were talking about the heartland...

...After she sat down, and the other Texan read—about the founder of a sailing ship company—I pulled out a newspaper column I’d written, inspired by recent campaign speeches...

...But the majority, the best (it goes without saying), project their interest outwards...

...The evening VIP party was held in a parking lot...

...with fellow readers—unlike with fellow writers—we feel a noncompetitive bond...