For your convenience, book fair tickets online

We've mentioned this before but it certainly bears repeating. Through the miracle of the Internet, you can now buy your tickets to the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair online.

For the practical minded among us, this is quite a convenience. It means, in real terms, that you don't have to stand in line at the box office to buy your tickets. One less obstacle to getting to what you're really coming for -- the books.

The folks at Eventbrite make it really quite easy to buy your tickets. Their website is easy to navigate and everything is quite clear. What's more, they have it set up so that you get immediate notification via email, and you get your tickets. You can print them out and bring them with you or leave them on your phone and we'll scan it when you arrive. Ain't technology wonderful?

We started this a couple of years ago and it's really amazing how many more people are buying their tickets online than did that first year. Eventbrite is probably a huge company by now. They're based in San Francisco, where all great technology-based ideas come from (are you an Uber Taxi fan?).

Back when we were setting all this up we had an occasion to call out there for some advice. The company seemed pretty tiny then. You had the impression of a few tech-savvy folks getting together to and creating this great idea for helping small venues deal with ticket sales. Don't think they even had a receptionist or a phone operator. The woman who answered the phone had all the answers as if she had been working on the software herself. (She might have been.) Think she might have said that she was the only one in the office. Everyone else had gone to lunch.

Anyway, we've been pleased that so many of you have decided that buying tickets online is the way to go. You may know that we've set up a discount code "saveabuck" so that if you enter it you'll save most of the service fee, plus you get the tickets immediately. Don't use the quotation marks. Just enter the code as one word. There's a link in the column on the right on this blog. Click where it says BUY TICKETS NOW. You'll be taken to our page on Eventbrite.

If it works for you, we hope you'll go online and get your tickets. If not, we're happy to accommodate you at the box office. We hope you won't have to wait in line too long. We'll get you in the door as soon as we can.

It's getting closer. We'll see you at the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair.

We're counting the days, hours, minutes, seconds ...

In just a few weeks, we'll be gathering at The Coliseum in downtown St. Petersburg for the 34th annual Florida Antiquarian Book Fair. Antiquarian booksellers from all over the country will be here for the oldest and largest book fair in the southeastern United States.

Every year we're thrilled when time for the book fair rolls around. We're looking forward to seeing old friends. Many of the booksellers have been showing at this book fair for decades. It's just what they do. They, in turn, have made many friends in Florida who come to see them every year. Meanwhile, there are always new book dealers who are exhibiting at the book fair for the first time. We look forward to seeing them as well.

Our dealers are knowledgeable about the books, maps, prints, ephemera, and related items they bring to the book fair. So if these things interest you, you're going to find kindred spirits at the book fair. A few years ago, someone described the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair as a little book village that springs up Brigadoon-like every year. We think its a special place to be and we hope you do, too.

More fuel in the e-book vs. real book battle

Article on the NPR website about the Harvard Medical School study.

We read with great interest (and glee, if truth be told) the recent reports of a study at Brigham & Women's Hospital in Boston that concluded that reading an iPad just before you go to bed most likely would be detrimental to your health. Seems all that flickering blueish light emitted by the e-readers wreaks havoc on your melatonin levels, and that, in turn messes up your sleep patterns.

Well, we didn't need a scientific study to tell us that. We were already pretty sure that flickering blue light can't be good for anybody. Look at TV, for instance (or don't). That's flickering blue light, isn't it? And everybody knows TV (most of it anyway) rots your brain. Still, we're glad Dr. Anne-Marie Chang, associate neuroscientist at Harvard Medical School, and her team undertook the study. Confirms what we've suspected all along.

Admittedly, we're somewhat biased when it comes to the question of good old-fashioned books vs. e-readers. Oh, sure. We've used iPads and Kindles before. We even own an iPad. But our anecdotal evidence shows that it clearly is an inferior experience reading a book on a screen. Maybe it's a cliche argument but it's also true that the visceral pleasure one gets from holding, smelling, and feeling a real book is unmatched by an electronic device. We won't even mention that there's no need to plug in a book to recharge it because it has no batteries.

Dr. Anne-Marie Chang

In our modest fantasy, Dr. Anne-Marie Chang, associate neuroscientist, who studies people's sleep patterns for a living, owns a vast library of classical literature and each evening curls up with a great leather-bound tome filled with deathless prose. This fantasy is based on absolutely nothing. We don't know Dr. Anne-Marie Chang, though she looks like a nice person, and we certainly don't know anything about her reading habits. Still, in our fantasy, we're pretty sure she undertook this study to show people that reading books on an e-reader is bad and reading real books is good. Perhaps our fantasy is fueled by our own bias. We can live with that.

If we let our fantasies run to their wildest extreme, Dr. Anne-Marie Chang, associate neuroscientist, and her entire team would take a break from studying the sleeping habits of hapless e-reading people and come to the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair in March. If they did, we would thank them profusely (and probably even buy them a beer) for undertaking such a wonderful study. But that's our fantasy and it has nothing to do with reality.

We doubt that this blog post or the report on the results of the Dr. Chang's study will do much to convince our readers of the value of real books. Indeed, we're well aware that we're the railing minister in the pulpit and our readers are the steadfast choir. You're here. You're reading this. Heck, maybe you're even reading this on your iPad. (Wouldn't that be ironic?) We'd suggest that you turn off your e-reader, and pick up a good real book to read for a little while before you go to sleep. Sweet dreams. We'll see you at the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair. Well rested, we hope.

Just a reminder: We have a new email address.

You know that three-toned signal you get when you dial a number that is not in service? Maybe we need one of those. Well, maybe not. Our phone is fine. It's our old email address that needs one of those tones because some people keep sending mail there and get a notice that it doesn't work. Guess that's the email version of that three-toned signal.

Anyway, we're not going to put the old email address here. We'd rather avoid the confusion. Instead, as you can see, we've displayed very prominently our new email address for anybody who hasn't seen it yet. We've had it for awhile but some folks still have the old email address in their files.

If you have ANY questions about the Florida Antiquarian Book Fair, that is the email address to use. Any questions. Any at all. Sarah Smith, the book fair manager, is on the other end of that email. She'd love to hear from you.