About next weekend's Printers Row Book Fair: Just go, people

CHICAGO TRIBUNE

Anyone who knows me for any length of time usually gets The Lecture: the one in which I point out that you never know when and how you'll run into a person or an idea or a scrap of music or an experience that changes your life, so you have to be open to everything. You can't plan for these encounters. You have to just go out and see what happens. A writer, Henry James once said, must be "a person upon whom nothing is lost." It's true for everyone. Go out, look around, take chances. Because you just never know.

That's my pitch to get you and your family to attend the Printers Row Book Fair, June 7-8. Friday's Tribune included a schedule, but you can catch up by checking printersrowbookfair.org. You'll find, as always, an array of your favorite Chicago-area authors -- Studs Terkel, Blue Balliett, Elizabeth Berg, Alex Kotlowitz, Miles Harvey, Scott Turow, Aleksandar Hemon, Kevin Guilfoile, Wen Huang, Achy Obejas, Carol Felsenthal -- plus notable out-of-towners such as Thomas Cahill and Augusten Burroughs.

Is my plea self-serving, seeing as how the Tribune sponsors this annual shindig in the South Loop area known as Printers Row? You bet it is. And I'll be there, hoping to entice the multitudes into a session at noon Saturday in the University Center's River Room to hear me pontificate about American ingenuity in the 19th Century.

But no matter what the Book Fair does for me and my Tribune colleagues, it will do something for you too. I don't know exactly what -- that's for you to find out. But if you stay home, you'll never know.

Copyright © 2018, Chicago Tribune
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