Come Find Us in the Wild This Weekend
There comes a moment in every small press publisher’s life when she looks around at the boxes of books, the event details, the table situation, the inventory question, the vague threat of capitalism, and thinks: yes, absolutely, let’s do a book fair at the last minute. So that is what we are doing.
Unsolicited Press will be exhibiting at the Rose City Book & Paper Fair this weekend, and you can find us in Booth H4. The fair is open Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., which means we will be there with books, table displays, and the particular facial expression of people who believe very deeply in literature but would also like everyone to understand that boxes of books are heavy.
We are fucking excited. We are also aware that “come to a book fair” is not the kind of thing the internet knows how to process anymore unless someone is crying in a car, holding an iced coffee, or explaining seven passive income streams they discovered after quitting their job to live in a refurbished barn. But here is the old-fashioned truth: book fairs matter. Tables matter. Conversations matter. The physical act of picking up a book, flipping through it, reading a sentence, making a face, putting it down, picking it back up, and deciding, yes, fine, this one is coming home with me, matters.
Not everything has to be optimized into a funnel. Sometimes the funnel is a table and sometimes it is a tote bag and a reader with poor impulse control. We support this.
As a small press, we spend a lot of time trying to get books in front of readers without the benefit of corporate budgets, giant co-op placements, celebrity blurbs engineered in a publishing laboratory, or whatever dark magic causes the same twelve books to appear on every front table in America. Our books do not arrive on a velvet conveyor belt of institutional certainty. They claw their way into the world with excellent sentences, stubborn authors, underpaid labor, and a marketing budget that occasionally looks like someone shook a coin purse over a spreadsheet.
And yet, here they are.
Books that are strange, tender, furious, funny, uncomfortable, beautiful, and absolutely not interested in behaving themselves for market convenience. Books written by authors who would very much appreciate being read before they are dead, canonized, and assigned to undergraduates who will then complain about them on the internet.
This is why events like the Rose City Book & Paper Fair matter so much to us. They give small presses a chance to exist somewhere other than the endless scroll. They give readers a chance to meet books without an algorithm hovering over their shoulder like a nervous little sales goblin. They give all of us a chance to remember that literature is not just content. It is not just product. It is not just metadata wearing a nice hat.
It is a relationship. A book moves from writer to editor to publisher to printer to table to reader. At every step, someone has to care. Someone has to say yes. Someone has to take the risk. Someone has to carry the box. Someone has to show up. This weekend, we are showing up. We would love it if you did too.
Browse. Tell us what you like to read. Pick up a book by someone you have never heard of and give them a fighting chance. Support independent publishing in the most practical way possible: by buying the book. Because here is the part people sometimes forget: small press books survive when readers buy them. Not when readers vaguely approve of them. Not when readers say “love this” and then disappear into the mist. Not when readers mean to order later, which is the literary equivalent of saying “we should get coffee sometime” to someone you fully intend to avoid.
The books need homes.
The authors need readers.
The press needs sales.
The culture needs something more interesting than whatever the algorithm is currently trying to spoon-feed us with a dead-eyed smile.
So yes, come to the book fair. Find Unsolicited Press in Booth H4 at the Rose City Book & Paper Fair this weekend. We’ll be there Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. with books, recommendations, and the slightly manic enthusiasm of people who still believe independent literature is worth the trouble.
