Tag: The Christmas Cats in Silly Hats series

Printers’ Row on 9/6, Saturday.

Today was the final day of Printers’ Row 2025.

It is the third largest outdoor book sales event in the United States. I’ve done Printers’ Row at least 5 times, always with limited success, because the expense to participate is substantial and most of the other vendors are offering books for as low as $5. If you bring the book you worked on for years to the table and try to charge the price listed on it, good luck to you.

Also, if you drive down and park, it costs a bundle. Buying something to eat while present for 8 hours in the streets of Chicago is also a fairly pricey proposition.

I think the cost to be present at the Illinois Association of Penwomen booth this year was $145 for 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Saturday and $135 for the same 8 hours on Sunday, which would be a total of $280 to be present for 16 hours in the streets of Chicago for the two days. If you bought the 2 days, all day, the price was lowered to $250, I was told, when I asked to be reminded today. (Yikes!)

The other problem I have is that I find it extremely taxing to spend a full 8 hours in the streets of Chicago, outside. I am not a morning person. Getting set up by 10 a.m. is bad enough. What I used to do was split the 8 hours with a second writer, taking the 2 to 6 p.m. shift myself and letting the 10 a.m. to 2 p.m. shift go to another writer who found the price tag for the full day rather high, as I do, and perhaps didn’t also want to spend 8 hours in the streets of Chicago (4 hours is about my limit). Cancer treatments from December of 2021 and on through 2023 definitely stopped me from participating those years. Last year (2024) I was still in Texas following our annual Family Fest over Labor Day. This year, we planned to exit Austin (Tx) in time to fly to Chicago on Thursday so I could participate on the following Saturday and Sunday. But it sounded like a lot; it is and it was.

My organization, which I have been a member of since 2002, routinely has a tented booth in a great location, but up until now they only allowed you to purchase an entire day, You could then split the 8 hour day  with another interested writer—if you could find one. That is what I have done every other year I have participated.

But the number of published writers from the Quad Cities who were ever interested in participating has bottomed out from zero to minus zero. I could never talk my friend David Dorris into participating in Chicago and he is now deceased. The entire event used to be held in June on the same day as Sean Leary’s birthday, so no dice there ever, despite several overtures to Sean.

Sometimes, I would find a Chicago writer—usually a total stranger—who wanted to split the 8 hours (and the fees) but driving 7 hours for meetings of the group has not been easy and my primary participation hs been selling my books at Printers’ Row. (Although I did serve as the official photographer at the national convention in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in 2019.)

So, this year, I bit and paid the freight for two days of sales, primarily for the collegiality and community of participating. Art & Sue Brauer always do a bang-up job of setting up the tent, (BIG THANKS to both of them). I tried setting up a table by myself one year, a year that it rained non-stop. That was totally miserable. Pam, my college roommmate, and I spent much of the time huddled inside the Dearborn Station, which was then a restaurant site, which I think may have closed.

There was one year that we had a mini-tornado and our booth nearly blew away! Doing the entire 8 hours in the sun if you did not have a tented canopy  was also grim. It is necessary to have a canopied tent in case it rains (as it did my first year) or the weather  is truly hot. Today was 66 degrees, cool in the shade, and there was a 25 to 30 mph wind. I took 2 coats. For most of the day, I wore both of the lightweight jackets.

I roused myself on Saturday to make it to the booth by 10 a.m. pulling my weighty books. I was there until 20 minutes before closing at 6 p.m.. I knew my BEE GONE book with Trump’s visage on the cover would draw attention, and it sure did! I started out with about 50 books and tonight I have 5 left. They were not a pricey purchase ($10); that was also a good thing.

I even sold a couple of sets of  “Obama’s Odyssey: The 2008 Race to the White House” , one set to a woman about my age who had worked for the Obama campaign. We shared our feeling of optimism when the United States elected its first Black president and how much we miss him now. I hope she enjoys the books.

I knew that, with troops massing on the edge of Chicago, a book with BEE GONE and DJT’s face on it would be a hit, and it was. It is a unique book. The illustrations by Gary McCluskey are Top Notch. The sentiment on the streets of Chicago was definitely not pro Trump today or yesterday.

I have heard that, next year, the PTB may decide to sell the days in halves, which would be good news for someone who spent 2 years doctoring for cancer and turned eighty this summer. Eight hours in the streets of Chicago is still a tall order. I get tired (and bored) after 4 hours. I came home both days, took a hot bath, and had a lengthy nap. I did not have enough energy to go out to eat either day, but ate food we had picked up at the grocery store on Friday. I also hosted my nephew Chris and his son Owen, who wanted to go to a baseball game, so the condo got some real use this weekend.

I did better this year than in any previous year. My little BEE GONE book seems to have made an impression. Someone said to me that he thought the book had had “national attention.” Not that I know of, although I did my best to get it into the hands of Seth Meyer when he played Chicago for his TV special. I also negotiated with the Biden campaign, getting to the right people to have a conversation just prior to Joe Biden’s run against Trump. The campaign intended to use the e-book as a reward for Democratic donors, but the pandemic moved the needle to facemasks, instead.

I also traded a film review for the e-mail contacts of people working behind-the-scenes for some of the late-night talk shows that Trump is now doing his best to get canceled (Stephen Colbert, anyone?). When Trump won the election (over Hillary) neither Facebook nor Amazon allowed me to advertise the book unless I changed the cover, which I refused to do, so my small protest against Trump 1.0 has languished ever since. Maybe  it will live to fight again?

I feel like I worked very hard today and yesterday, even though, today, I did not show up until 1 p.m.  I closed down the entire open air festival at 6 p.m., one of the last to pack up my old kit bag and leave. I did not completely sell out all of my books, but I did have to scavenge books from my book shelf in the condo in order to have some to sell today.

Printers’ Row on Sunday, 9/7/2025.

Did I make any money? Well, I used the Square successfully, which, in itself, was a Small Miracle. It showed about $200 of sales, which, obviously, would not be “a killing” if I paid $250 to be present. There were other cash sales. I spent zero dollars on parking, as my spouse kindly consented to drop me off and pick me up, and, as per usual, I packed a sandwich, some pop, and an apple for an economical lunch.

Selling books in the streets of Chicago is interesting, however. I met some lovely folks who applauded my continuing efforts to underscore the need to oppose DJT and I sold quite a few of the actual children’s book that inspired BEE GONE, which was intended for my granddaughters, initially, via Ingram Spark Publishing, the sixth in “The Christmas Cats in Silly Hats” series.

Check out the other five books in the six-book series at www.ConnieCWilson.com.