National Book Festival Washington D.C.

Librarian Susie Sharp attends The National Book Festival

I was honored to be asked by the State Librarian, Mary Soucie, to attend The National Book Festival in Washington D.C. and work the booth for North Dakota. We were set up in the Pavilion of States at The Walter E. Washington Convention Center where there was a booth for each state plus the American territories. When people came into the convention center they were given a bag for all the giveaways and a map, if they got all 50 states plus the territories stamped by each booth they could turn the map in for a free book.

L-R- Our wonderful Junior League Volunteer, ND State Librarian Mary Soucie, Talking Books Coordinator Sue Hammer-Schneider, Susie Sharp Librarian Eddy-New Rockford Library

Our booth had plastic cups that said Book Nerd on them, magnets and postcards with a wordle of North Dakota Authors. To tell you the scale of how many people came through the booth we had 1000 cups and ran out of them by 11 am and that was actually the slowest time of the day.  We had a lot of fun at our booth and were surprised how many attendees had a North Dakota story, the family from Virginia that had vacationed in Medora this summer and attended the musical and pitch fork fondue, the many people who were stationed at either Minot AFB or Grand Forks AFB, the young lady who said her grandmother started the first library in a small town in North Dakota but unfortunately couldn’t remember the name of the town, and many more.

                                                   A picture of some of the crowd

There were author events all day but we were too busy in our booth to go see any of them, however at the end of the day I was able to get down to have Lisa See sign our library’s copy of China Dolls.

This trip was a lot of fun; I was able to get a little sightseeing done but will need to go back one day to see everything I missed.