BEA16 Day 2

Remember, I’m a newbie at BEA.

So when I arrived this morning of day 2, having caught an early shuttle (these free shuttles from downtown to BEA are fantastic!), I was shocked seeing a loooooooooooong line. I thought, oh these people are waiting for some book signing.
And to my horror, I swear the line must have been close to a mile long (well, it’s a slight exaggeration, maybe), I discovered this was the ACTUAL line to ENTER the exhibit floor!!

People were standing, a lot were sitting, in between these temporary fence things like at airports.

But oh miracle, when 9:00 came, they took all these off, and then the way was open for the herd – that’s really what we all looked like, to be honest. So actually in a couple of minutes I was in the magic world of books!

If you read my post yesterday, you may know I spent my whole day at the Book Bloggers Conference and didn’t go to the main floor to look at books. Which made me miss a couple of giveaways I wanted from authors translated from the French, but that’s ok, other presses dedicated to fiction in translation were SO generous to me today! More on that another day.

I had said I was going to be very picky and would only get 6 books, well, I’m already at 14, and there’s still tomorrow. I know this may sound ridiculously low to most of you (some get close to 100, some close to 200 – and this is NOT an exaggeration!) I talked with bloggers who take books back home to give to colleagues, to their school library, or to put in their own outdoor “tiny library”. Really neat (Deb, you are awesome)!
But personally, I want to take only what I really want to read (very limited space on shelves) or to give to some specific people.

So, what do you think was in my 4 bags today?

I’ll take a haul picture tomorrow!

I had a bit of a crisis around noon, when I realized I had lost my precious paper where I had listed all the booths I absolutely had to visit, and the events I wanted to attend. Plus I just realized, on the back of that paper were my notes on yesterday’s key note speaker – and I was going to do a post on that!!

Well, that will teach me to have my info just on a piece of paper (by hand, old school), instead of a digital document saved somewhere!

Apart from booths visiting (having lost that paper, I had now no excuse not to visit them all!), some book signing, some author stage talks, I had the chance today to spend more time with some book bloggers.
I hope to speak to a few more bloggers tomorrow,  plus a stage talk and booths-revisiting!
That’s a lot of miles (my hiking sandals are perfect). Though I’m not sure I lost any pound, as a few booths offer great coffee and… croissants and the like.
Why indeed lose precious time to go to floor 2 to eat, lol.
Talk to you tomorrow with more pictures.