The 2025 Twin Cities Book Fair

The 2025 Twin Cities Book Fair was a different kettle of fish. Rain Taxi chose a new venue, the elegant St. Paul Union Depot, and it was definitely a warmer and classier spot than the previous location in the eco-building on the state fairgrounds. I was told that the depot also has better facilities for author events. I don’t know much about that because I hadn’t heard of any of the authors and didn’t attend any of those events.

There was general agreement among the people I talked to that the parking at the new site is terrible. It’s also difficult to get something to eat quickly. A third strike against the new venue is that the room isn’t really big enough to host the event. It was so crowded that as I moved down the aisles, I spent more time plotting out and negotiating a route through the throng than I did looking at the books.

Then again, maybe that’s just as well. I don’t really need any new books.

And as far as I know, the Rain Taxi folks might have been pleased as punch at how the day went.

The first person I chatted with on my stroll through the crowd was Marguerite Ragnow, whom I’d never met before. She’s the curator of the James Ford Bell Library, where I took one of my last classes before dropping out of grad school in 1978. I knew she’d know the former curator Carol Urness, with whom I reconnected recently and worked on a book with a few years ago. Marguerite proudly showed me a dazzling book that the Bell Library published late in 2019--right before Covid--called Tulips, Chocolate, and Silk. It features illustrations from books in the collection in spectacular color. I was impressed. 

We discussed the work of a pioneer in digitalizing maps whose name neither of us could quite remember: David something. (It came to me just now—David Rumsey.) And that was the extent of my contact with actual books during my morning peregrinations.

I spent the rest of the time dodging attendees and reconnecting with old friends. Near the far end of the central aisle I ran into Meleah Maynard, a seasoned freelance writer who introduced me a quarter century ago to Eric Loreberer, editor of Rain Taxi and impresario behind the fest, Recently retired, she told me a bit about the delights and challenges of dealing with all that free time.

While we were chatting, poet Norita Dittberner-Jax spotted us and came over to say hi. She’d recently been in Paris with her three children. “I know,” I said, “I saw the photos you posted. Hilary and I haven’t been there since 1989. I was inspired!”

I’m often in communication with Annie Klessig, who does the metadata and many other things at Bookmobile. I was impressed with her shirt, which said METADATA in fanciful white letters across the front. “I like that tee shirt,” I told her.

“It’s Metallica,” she said, grinning. I looked again.

“No. It says ‘metadata.’”

“I mean the FONT. This is the Metallica font. You know, the heavy metal band?”

“Ah, now I get it.”

I was going to tell her about the black tee shirt I have that says “bookslinger” in white letters across the front. I’m sure it’s a collector’s item, but I haven’t been able to get into it in thirty-five years, and I’m not one for black. 

Down at the Nodin Press booth, where I’d volunteered to cover for Norton during his lunch break, who should pop up but Rod Richards, recently retired from his post as a Unitarian minister. Rod and I were in the same writers’ group back in the 80s. He later took over the small-press distributor Bookslinger before moving to California with his wife, Hanje, and becoming a man of the cloth.

“Are you still writing?” I asked.

“I’m trying to figure out how I might fit into this scene again,” he said, perhaps a little wistfully.

“Well, I’m sure you’ve honed your style writing sermons,” I said.

“One a week for thirteen years.”

At one point, standing behind the Nodin Press table, I noticed two young women looking carefully at Freya Manfred’s memoir, Raising Twins. When they looked up I could see why. “We’re identical twins,” one of them giggled.

“But you’re two inches taller than your sister,” I protested.

“Yes, but my sister is two minutes older than me.”

Norton has gathered a fine collection of spirits together under the Nodin Press imprint, and I’ve had the pleasure of helping them produce their books while hovering on the fringes of the ensemble from time to time. I’m sure there were similar congeries of kindred spirits gathered here and there throughout the hall. Conventions are like that. And book people are like that, readers and writers alike, looking for recognition, perhaps, but more importantly, for a bit of camaraderie.

Samuel Johnson once wrote:

The transition from an author's book to his conversation, is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendor, grandeur and magnificence; but when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke.

I haven’t found that to be true, perhaps because I’ve already gotten to know the authors I’m chatting with a little. I mentioned to poet Phil Bryant, a jazz fan like me, that I was heading down to the Dakota in a few days to hear Joshua Redman, and we discovered in the course of conversation that we share certain reservations about Redman’s sometime accompanist Brad Mehldau—a little too spacy, arbitrary, abstract?

A few minutes later, after she’d recovered from the shock of learning I was an Oxfordian (though an indifferent one, not a fanatic), Joyce Sutphen was reciting a lengthy passage from Twelfth Night. I could barely hear her over the din, but as I listened, I was reminded of how much of the richness of the Bard’s words is lost in performance. You really have to study it line by line to appreciate it fully.

Everyone knows this, I guess. But it’s also true that the dynamic impact of his dramas never comes through fully when you’re alone in a room struggling to act out the play inside your head, pondering the action line by line.

Mastering the ins and outs of the man’s work can be a lifelong task, and I simply don’t have the inclination. Give me Kenneth Branaugh’s Hamlet, Olivier’s Richard III, Stanley Tucci’s Midsummer’s Night Dream, and Verdi’s Otello, and I’ll be content.

Norton was back from lunch, and I was deep in conversation with Joyce’s partner, Walt, when I suddenly remembered that I’d parked illegally. Sure, I’d paid. But the protocol required that I enter my license number into the screen at the kiosk. At the time, I couldn’t quite remember it, but I didn’t feel like walking all the way back to my car to doublecheck. 

I arrived back at the car twenty minutes later. My guess had been wrong—not RYJ 568 but RYJ 679. But the parking lot gods had spared me. No ticket. 

These days the book gods seem to be in my corner, too.