Most book signings don’t feature an introduction and interview by the author’s family, but Paul Griffin’s appearance Wednesday night at a bookstore near his parents’ Long Island home was a different story.
Perhaps I shouldn’t be surprised – Adrift, after all, is an adventure novel in which the most suspenseful, gripping moments concern emotional rather than physical challenges, so we know that Paul knows a thing or two about personal relationships. For example, Paul’s father, Art, taught English for 33 years and analyzed passages from Adrift immediately after Paul finished reading them aloud! And it was Art, not Paul or his agent, who chose the passages to be read at the signing.
Those passages were marked in Art’s own hardcover copy of Adrift and accompanied by a pile of notes. The notes could have been set up just as easily on a screen instead of a page. Art could have displayed the passages on a projector, and Paul could even have read them via video chat from his apartment in Manhattan.
But all the details that made the hour and a half of interviewing, reading, and autographing so personal depended on the tangibility of Paul’s presence and the audience’s copies of Adrift: handshakes and hugs; signatures; a single shared microphone; the audience rifling pages to follow Paul’s narration; and Paul’s sprint to his car to retrieve extra books when, three minutes after the event was set to start, the store sold out.
Here’s the thing: You can’t sell out of e-books or run to your car to grab a few more downloads. Manipulating a computer mouse doesn’t have the effect of a handshake. And asking an author to sign an e-reader just wouldn’t seem right.
Book signings have a way of creating nostalgia for ink and paper even as they drive home the sense that some books need to be held in our hands, in children’s hands. A signed book is a treasure (as much as any book is a treasure), and if it didn’t offer us something to hold onto, reading would threaten to become something entirely different.
That’s not to say that book lovers should fear technology. (Paul is thrilled to have narrated the audio version of Adrift and would jump at the chance to see any of his five novels adapted as films...I asked him!). But for book lovers who are also author lovers, reading and signing events at least call for a balance. We need online broadcasts of author interviews and book talks, but we also need dozens of chairs crowded into the aisle between manga and page-turners. We need Sharpies and fresh, blank paper.
We need books guiding us closer to authors and closer to each other.
-- Rachel Gutman, Scholastic intern
