Scene: 19th edition of a Chicago favorite

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Ask Barbara Lynne about the history of the Printers Row Book Fair, and she'll tell you of the dark night the fair nearly went airborne.

The Saturday half of the event in this particular year--she doesn't recall which year--had gone off fine, but, overnight, a windstorm arose, threatening the large tents in which poet and author readings were held.

"The tents started to blow around," says Lynne, the former executive director of the Near South Planning Board and one of the founders of the fair, "and I remember, at three o'clock in the morning, I was out there hanging onto tent poles, trying to keep the tents from blowing into the lake."

The tents never did fly out over Lake Michigan and the Sunday events went on as planned. But the story illustrates the element of surprise that's always been at the heart of the book fair.

There's the weather, of course. Over its 18 years, the outdoor fair has had a little of everything--pounding rain, baking heat, even clear skies and comfortable temperatures.

More to the point are the surprises, almost always pleasant, that come from having so many books, so many authors and so many lovers of reading crammed in one small space south of the Loop.

You stroll up and down the scores of tables along Dearborn Street, between Congress Parkway and Polk Street--once likened to "a bookshelf a mile long"--and you discover, say, the hard-to-find hardcover copy of Vance Bourjaily's novel "The Hound of Earth" that you've been searching for.

Or, maybe, you stumble across and fall in love with a book you've never heard of before on the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem. Or an author, reading in one of the tents, who becomes your new favorite.

"You go for one purpose and you find something else," says Brad Jonas, co-owner of the three Powell's Book Stores in Chicago and a participant in the fair from its beginnings.

For instance, he says, "I'd never known of Grace Paley before last year."

Paley, praised as a writer's writer for her poetry and short stories and honored as well as an unwavering advocate for social justice, was the recipient of the 2002 Harold Washington Literary Award, given in conjunction with the fair.

"I went to a couple of the [author] panels, and she was there too," Jonas says. "It was a treat to see a world-famous person being excited over books."

The fair, he says, always has had a kaleidoscopic feel of many things happening at once, like a carnival or a circus. And it shows, Jonas says, that reading, usually thought of as a solitary activity, can have a communal aspect.

"It doesn't have to be quiet and solemn. There can be some energy to it," he says.

So, the Printers Row Book Fair always has been rooted in the unexpected, and, given that history, it was fitting that the biggest news last year about the event was a surprise--the announcement in November that the Near South Planning Board had sold the fair to the Chicago Tribune.

Scene: The 8th annual Printers Row Book Fair, 1992

Seventy-eight-year-old Ralph Ellison, author of the novel "Invisible Man," about the experience of African-Americans in the mid-20th Century, is being honored with the Harold Washington Literary Award.

He fields questions from the audience, such as, "How important is reading in shaping a youth?"

"As important as eating well."

Finally, it's time for the last question: "After 40 years, do you think black people are still invisible?"

Slyly grinning, Ellison answers: "Some is, and some ain't."

This year's installment of the fair, to be held June 7 and 8--the first to be known as the Chicago Tribune Printers Row Book Fair--will be much like the 18 that have gone before. Same place, same weekend, probably some of the same books for sale on the tables.

"It's a shakedown cruise for us as we dip our toe into the water," says Owen Youngman, the Tribune's vice president for development.

The announcement of the Tribune's purchase of the fair took many Chicagoans by surprise because, in its nearly two decades, the event had evolved into something of a civic institution.

The transaction, though, had an underlying logic that made sense for the planning board and the newspaper--as well as for the fair's long-term future.

In recent years, the Tribune has been in the process of increasing its funding for Chicago-area programs that boost literacy and reward literary endeavors. "We don't have much of a business if people can't read," Youngman says.

The idea of sponsoring a major literary event, he notes, had been kicked around the executive offices at Tribune Tower since 1999. It gained added momentum when the Tribune's parent, Tribune Company, purchased the Times Mirror Co. in 2000, and among the Tribune's new sister papers was the Los Angeles Times.

Since 1996, the Times has sponsored a major book festival each April on the campus of UCLA. With the new relationship, Tribune executives were able to get an inside look at how to carry out a major literary event. "Now we could see the plumbing of one," Youngman says.

The Near South Planning Board, meanwhile, had been looking--"every year, forever," according to Bette Cerf Hill--for a major sponsor for its book fair, which was an exhausting annual endeavor for the small non-profit organization.

"The Book Fair, for the planning board, was a joy and a burden," says Hill, the board's first president and executive director. "The fair [which cost about $200,000 to put on] had become bigger than the organization."

The planning board--made up of local businesses, developers and agencies, and originally known as the Burnham Park Planning Board--was established in 1980 by Hill and Lynne to foster development in Printers Row and the rest of the South Loop.

This was an area with a long, storied and often less-than-respectable history in the growth of Chicago. Indeed, during the last three decades of the 19th Century, it was known for the Levee, a two-block district with more than three dozen brothels, nearly four dozen saloons, myriad pawnbrokers and gambling rooms and even an opium den, all centered on Custom House Place, now called Federal Street, between Harrison and Polk Streets.

By the turn of the century, reformers had made enough noise that the city cracked down on the Levee, driving its unsavory businesses out, usually just to other neighborhoods. At the same time, large, imposing buildings, many of them printing operations, were being built in the area, giving it a new aura of respectability and a new name: Printers Row.

For half a century, those plants were a busy hub of economic activity and energy. Then, in the aftermath of World War II, like many other businesses in major U.S. cities such as Chicago, the companies left for the wide-open spaces and lower taxes of the suburbs and other areas of the country. Printers Row became an empty corner of the city with few residents except for those single men, often with the barest of financial resources, living in single-room occupancy hotels along State, Clark and Van Buren Streets.

"Some of those SROs were extremely bad," recalls Lynne, who visited many as a representative of the planning board. "The living conditions were so bad you wouldn't have wanted to put your dog there."

In the 1970s, artists, particularly sculptors, began moving into Printers Row, and the renovation of the 69-year-old Transportation Building at 600 S. Dearborn St. in 1980 was a turning point in the rejuvenation of the area.

But the dusty old image of Printers Row as a place to avoid remained for most Chicagoans, so Hill and Lynne groped for ideas to showcase the community.

The planning board sponsored a photography fair, a sculpture exhibition and a distance run.

Then Hill's husband, Bruce Sagan, publisher at the time of the Southtown Economist, suggested that, for their next promotion, they look to Paris and the book stalls along the Seine River as a model.

Bingo!

- - -

Scene: The 2nd annual Printers Row Book Fair, 1986

"Make me a tiger, clown!" the young boy yells as he runs full speed at Whodunit, who is sweating buckets under his yellow wig, makeup, blue overalls and bright-patterned sports jacket.

It's a 90-degree day, and Whodunit, also known as Jeff Segal, had been moving up and down the streets of the book fair for hours, doing magic tricks and forming balloons into colorful animal shapes.

Now he is wilted, but still game.

As his young fan waits impatiently, Whodunit begins twisting and tying balloons into the requested tiger. "I have to suffer for my art," he sighs under his breath.

- - -

That first year, 1985, the fair had 41 used-book sellers and other book-related vendors, and attracted 6,500 visitors. But quickly, the event caught on, drawing 30,000 a weekend by the end of the 1980s and 75,000 by the mid-1990s.

Last June, it featured 190 vendors and more than 90 literary programs, including a talk by Paley, and hosted 85,000 visitors. That brought the total attendance for the 18 years of the fair to just more than 1 million, Hill says.

"I do love books and literature," says Hill, the event's resident troubadour from the start.

"You can learn a lot from books--at your own pace, in your own privacy, in your own private space. And yet, at the same time, you can share ideas with people. And, maybe most important for me, you can see the same thing in a completely different way because you're seeing it through somebody else's eyes."

Hill's memories of the fair include her first exposure to three Chicago poets whose work she has come to cherish--Lisel Mueller, Julie Parson-Nesbitt and Li-Young Lee.

Then, she says, there was "this one lady who'd come with a suitcase on a plane from California, and inside the suitcase were the most exquisite miniature books. She went home with an empty suitcase each year."

She remembers Chilean novelist Isabel Allende, the winner of the 1996 Harold Washington Literary Award, cautioning Americans, during her acceptance speech, about the fragility of civil liberties.

"She said, `Watch out and defend your democracy since it can go away in a heartbeat'--because it really happened to her in her country. She warned about free speech disappearing," Hill says.

And she remembers Susan Sontag, the first recipient of the Washington award, who gave her stamp of approval to the fair on the day in 1989 she was to give a talk at Dearborn Station.

"It's a short distance from her hotel--it's the Hyatt now--to the station where she was to speak," Hill says. "She bought a couple hundred dollars of books on the way to give the talk. She couldn't wait."

Scene: The 18th annual Printers Row Book Fair, 2002

Grace Paley is a troublemaker, Studs Terkel tells the crowd of 250 people in the ballroom of the Union League Club, honoring the 79-year-old Paley as the Harold Washington Literary Award recipient. She's an improper woman, Terkel says. And she represents hope for the future.

Terkel, who has just turned 90, talks of laughing out loud with glee and mumbling to himself with concentration while reading one of Paley's stories on a bus. And he talks about her willingness over the decades to challenge the American establishment. "Grace Paley lives out loud, in contrast to those who live lives of quiet desperation," he says.

And he tells of seeing a young man reading a Paley book on an airplane flight to Chicago and asking him why he liked the book.

"Because it touches me," the man responded.

"That's the hope of Grace Paley. She touches generations," Terkel says. "Especially now since 9/11, she represents what I call the old patriotism, which, in an open society, means questioning something that's wrong."

- - -

Hill had heard rumors about the Tribune's interest in putting its name on a book fair, whether new or established, so when she got the call from Youngman seeking a meeting, she was pretty sure what the topic would be.

The two talked initially on Sept. 9, and, by the end of November, the deal was done.

The Tribune would buy the fair for an undisclosed sum and promise to keep it in the Printers Row area, or at least the Near South neighborhood, although Youngman says, "We have no intention of moving it." The planning board would retain sponsorship of the Harold Washington Literary Award dinner.

This year's Chicago Tribune Printers Row Book Fair, while it will be much like the 18 that have come before, nonetheless will have some new features.

There will be climate-controlled tents for some of the literary programming, and the use of the Harold Washington Library Center, rather than the acoustically challenged Dearborn Station, for major events, such as the appearance of Margaret Atwood, the winner of the 2003 Harold Washington Literary Award.

The library is on the north side of Congress, and, before this year, the fair's organizers steered away from using the building for fear that, once fair visitors crossed the eight-lane Congress, they'd never find their way back to the book tables. Youngman says, "There will be a trolley to take people back and forth, and the city is going to help us get people across those eight lanes."

In addition, the fair will expand south into Dearborn Park, where family-oriented programing will be centered, and will feature a tent, staffed by literacy agencies funded by the Tribune's charitable arms, where fair visitors can sign up to be tutors.

Hill, like others involved in the fair from its start, admits to a tinge of anxiety over letting control of it go to someone else.

The mother of three daughters, Hill says that looking for a new sponsor for the fair was "like I wanted my daughter to marry well, so I sort of hope and pray the Tribune is a good bridegroom.

"In a modern sense, she gets to keep her own name, hopefully her independent spirit and she gets a lot of support.

"Sounds like a good modern marriage, doesn't it?"

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