RARE BOOK CAFE: Madlyn Blom, president of the Florida Antiquarian Booksellers Association, on new book fair dates

WATCH LIVE: Madlyn Blom, president of the Florida Antiquarian Booksellers Association, will appear on Rare Book Cafe on Saturday, June 4, at 2:30  p.m.  ET to discuss the date change for the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair to April. The change to April is very unusual. Long-time book fair fans know that for the last 35 years the book fair has been in March most years. Join us live to ask questions. A recorded version of this session will be available here after the broadcast.

RARE BOOK CAFE: Boe Rushing, Back in the Day Books, on setting up an independent rare bookstore in today's market

WATCH LIVE: Boe Rushing is opening his bookstore next year for the third time in the Tampa Bay area. Boe opened Back in the Day Books in 2010 in Tarpon Springs. In 2013, he moved to Dunedin, where he was in two different locations, one on the main street in town and the other slightly off the beaten path. Boe reluctantly decided in 2015 to close again. Now, through a special public-private lease arrangement, Boe has a new location in downtown Dunedin and expects to reopen in March in a new building with an historic facade.

Boe believes in supporting local businesses, and particularly local bookstores. He'll discuss both topics on Rare Book Cafe. You can watch Boe's appearance on Rare Book Cafe on Saturday at 2:30 p.m. ET on blab.im. You also can watch the program live right here on the book fair blog.

Boe received a law degree from Stetson University's College of Law in 1993 but he has spent little time in his career as a lawyer. In 2001, he moved to Canada to get married but he wasn't able to practice law there without jumping through too many hoops so he decided to find a career where he could be self-employed doing something he loved.

A conversation with a rare book dealer led to the realization that the antiquarian book business was perfect for him. He opened a shop in Canada in a 150-year-old building a couple of doors down from a coffee shop. The neighborhood had lots of "book people" and the business thrived.

After the birth of his daughter, Holly, in 2004, Boe sold off his inventory, closed his first bookstore,  and he and his family moved back to his native Florida. Boe sold books online. A scholarship to the Colorado Antiquarian Book Seminar in 2009 led to the conviction that he really wanted to have a bricks-and-mortar store and the rest is history.

Boe is president of the Florida Antiquarian Booksellers Association and an annual exhibitor at the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair.

You can watch Rare Book Cafe on Thursdays at 8 p.m. ET and Saturdays at 2:30 p.m. ET on blab.im. Replays of the program also are available at blab.im as well as on the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair blog. Selected episodes also can be watched on the book fair's YouTube Channel.

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Origins of the FABA logo

Marketing man Larry Kellogg's handiwork created in the early 1990s.

In the early ‘90s, Tampa Bay marketing pro Larry Kellogg took over management of the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair, which he continued for the next couple of decades. One of his early executive decisions was to create a new logo for the book fair, and there hangs a tale.

Kellogg, who was promotions manager for WFLA TV and Radio for several years and later was marketing manager for Bayfront Center, was also a circus nut. He went often to the circus as a kid growing up in Kansas. He loved the big top and everything about the circus, but especially the marketing and advertising -- the colorful hucksterism of it all.

This passion led to a job as regional publicist for Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in Sarasota. Collecting circus memorabilia – books, magazines, fliers, banners and those big gaudy posters -- provided another outlet for Kellogg's circus obsession.

Kellogg scoured local bookstores in search of circus books and became, naturally, a regular at the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair. More dealers, more circus stuff, right?

Larry Kellogg

Kellogg struck up a friendship with Mike Slicker, first president of the Florida Antiquarian Booksellers Association, and a founder of the book fair. Eventually, Kellogg was asked to manage the annual fair.

Kellogg was an early adapter when it came to desktop publishing. He owned a TRS-80, Tandy Corporation’s early entry into personal computers, which was known affectionately by users and dirisively by detractors as the Trash 80. Kellogg toiled with an early version of CorelDRAW, a graphics program.

When Kellogg took over management of the book fair, one of his earliest moves was to create a new logo. He found illuminated letters in an art font program and constructed the logo in CorelDRAW, carefully cutting and pasting each letter and adjusting them until he got the look he wanted.

The logo was evidently an exercise in restraint, alien to his natural circus inclintions. Graphics experts and instructions for CorelDRAW advise using perhaps two, but never more than three fonts in a flier, Kellogg notes (he used only two fonts in the FABA logo).

“The only place you use more typefaces than that is on a ransom note or a circus poster,” Kellogg says with some amusement, ‘and you can use as many as you want on a circus poster.”

Larry Kellogg still collects circus memorabilita. He wrote a blog item last year for Worthpoint.com about searching for circus memorabilia at the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair.

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