It would be stretching a point to suggest the Tucson Festival of Books went off without a hitch this month.
Disaster nearly struck in the festival’s opening moments … during the Storybook Parade.
The parade is a joyful procession of musicians and walk-around book characters who lead 100-200 children from the bookstore to the festival’s Children and Teens area. It was a chilling moment when, somewhere along the way, someone asked what happened to Clifford the Big Red Dog?
“There were so many people we lost him somehow,” Executive Director Melanie Morgan laughed, remembering the 6-foot costumed pooch. “How do you lose Clifford the Big Red Dog? He turned up, eventually, but we may need to get him micro-chipped before next year’s festival.”
Ladybug Girl greets children at the Tucson Festival of Books at the University of Arizona on Saturday, March 4.
After that one, brief oops, the festival settled in for one of the most successful weekends it has had.
“It was amazing,” Morgan said. “Attendance was great. Our vendors said sales were great. To see the festival back to being its former self, after all we’ve been through the last few years, was huge.”
Morgan was especially happy for the 2,000 community volunteers who planned — and then staged — such a fun party.
“They did the lion’s share of the work,” she said. “They’re the ones who kept the festival alive, and now look. We’re back!”
Held March 4-5 at the University of Arizona, this year’s festival felt much like the record-breaking bookapalooza held in 2019. Preliminary numbers suggest it was close:
UA officials estimated weekend attendance was about 125,000 people, perhaps 10,000 fewer than 2019 but 25,000 people more than last year.
Sunday’s crowd of 60,000 was the largest ever on a book festival Sunday.
In back-to-back sessions that Sunday afternoon, two of the three largest audiences in festival history gathered to see Linda Ronstadt and Bernie Sanders.
308 authors appeared on festival stages, the third-most ever.
A number of vendors, including Mostly Books and UA Press, reported record or near-record weekend sales.
Holding it all together was the largest single cadre of volunteers in Tucson history, the 1,711 Tucsonans who worked shifts the week of the festival.
Readers in the University of Arizona Bookstores tent at the 2023 Tucson Festival of Books.
This number did not include the 223 volunteers who moderated panels, or the 180 who plan the festival year-round, or the 55 groups of singers and dancers who performed on entertainment stages scattered across the UA campus.
Morgan said it may be June before all the numbers are in, so until then she will remember something else from book festival weekend:
“I’ll remember the happy faces of so many children, so many adults, all of us being part of this big public thing we can all do together. Where else but Tucson could this even happen?”
Others will have their own memories …
Several festival volunteers were chatting between sessions when they saw 84-year-old Holocaust survivor and author Tova Friedman plowing through the crowd on the UA Mall. Asked where she was headed, Friedman said “someplace with initials.” She had left her escorts behind so she could get comfortable in the ILC – the Integrated Learning Center – before her scheduled session. And, with a little help from her new friends, that’s exactly what she did.
As Bernie Sanders was arriving at the festival on Sunday afternoon, he learned Linda Ronstadt had just appeared … and was about to leave. He wanted to meet her, so he lingered at the curb. “I’m your biggest fan,” he said, beaming, as he reached for her hand.
This year’s True Grit award went to author Becca Andrews, whose Friday night flight to Tucson was canceled. Undismayed, she drove from Nashville to Memphis the next morning and tried again. That flight was delayed. Andrews missed her session scheduled for Saturday but finally – on Sunday – appeared in a panel with Dahlia Lithwick and Joshua Prager. Three hours later, she flew home.
GrubHub founder Mike Evans is a cycling enthusiast who couldn’t resist the temptation to ride in Tucson. He rented a bike early Monday morning and rode the Chuck Huckelberry Loop before racing to the airport for his flight home.
Author Dahlia Lithwick, a senior editor at Slate and host of Amicus, a podcast about the law and the Supreme Court, greets fans and signs books at the Tucson Festival of Books at the University of Arizona on Saturday, March 4.
Several book festival authors, one of them J.R. Jance, returned to Tucson last weekend for the Left Coast Crime conference of Western mystery writers at El Conquistador Hotel in Oro Valley.
Canyon del Oro High School alum Tom Zoellner, author of “Rim to River,” returned to book-tour the state this last week.
Fittingly, it was a book festival author who provided the best summary of TFOB 2023. In his weekly newsletter, David Corn put it this way:
“Imagine living in a town of 100,000 people who all read books, relish books, buy lots of books and talk about books. I had the pleasure of doing so this past weekend in Tucson.”
FOOTNOTES
Ronstadt and Sanders both appeared before capacity crowds of 1,100 people in the Student Union Ballroom. Only one audience in book festival history has been larger. In 2015, noted academic Noam Chomsky was seen by an estimated 1,500 people in Centennial Hall.
CSPAN was again a visible presence this year. In addition to airing a number of sessions live from Gallagher Theater, CSPAN had a popup studio in the middle of the book festival. Among those interviewed were Sanders, Malcolm Nance and Chris Whipple.
Taco Dragon will be the featured guest at the next Story Time for kids at the University of Arizona Bookstore. Programs will begin at 10:30 a.m. and 2 p.m. on Saturday, April 1. Sessions are free, and parents are welcome to stay with their children. Get more info at shop.arizona.edu/storytime.
