An incredible waste of time, well-spent.
For me, this afternoon was both. I was at the Colorado Authors Open House and Book Signing during the the Longmont Library Festival. The first warning sign should have been the presence of “library” and “festival” in the same phrase. The second should have been the recognition that library patrons, while acquisitive, are not generally in a buying mood, given the relative abundance of borrowable volumes in the vicinity. Plus Longmont is 40 miles away from where I live in Denver.
But Carol Cail, a very nice novelist/library volunteer, sent me a note with a referral from David Barron, an old friend and radio journalist/author (The Beast in the Garden, about the growing number of unpleasant mountain lion-human throwdowns our growing exurbs are fostering). If it was good enough for David, it was good enough for me. Plus the event was a couple of months off at the time I committed, and I discount the future value of my time immensely. So I mailed a box of a few books up and brought a few more (most authors were bringing 10, Carol had said), packed up a FedEx posterboard cover shot of From Jars to the Stars, my cantaloupe-sized polymer comet bequeathed last year after a lightly attended NASA talk, and my engineering model infrared-detector radiator engineering model and headed up I-25 in the minivan.
There were 78 Colorado authors there, including David and me, who were both up on the second floor. Holding the festival’s author-related subevent from 2p-5p on a workday may not have been the greatest strategy, in retrospect (this was the first such event, we would learn). The setup was well done; missing were only patrons — so the 78 authors more or less talked to each other.
Now, I’ve not posted here in some time because I’m, well, a bit busy — mostly with a couple of part-time gigs, one writing for University of Colorado Hospital; the other as editor of CleanEnergy.com. But I also have these small people my wife and I conspired to bring to the world, “daughters,” they’re called, in Kindergarten and third grade. And a neighbor’s driveway was crowded with 15 cubic yards of mulch, three yards of which were mine (cubic also — linear yards offer poor garden coverage) to be wheelbarrowed. And an inane blog posting to be written, and a puggles to be tended to, and so forth.
So, commercially speaking, this was a complete, colossal waste of time and gasoline. Zero books sold (in line with the consensus analyst estimate, but still).
But when a nice woman in a green Longmont Library Festival T-shirt walked me to the table I’d be spending the next three hours, (in the adult fiction section, next to the works of Stieg Larsson, who never attended a library festival, and also Dennis Lehane, who is a compulsive library-festival attendee, but always in disguise) was slouching, legs extended with sandals at the end of them, a lanky man with graying hair just long enough to usurp control at its whimsy. In front of him lay several books, all with bicycles on them.
The man was somewhat quiet at first, I think skeptical mainly of my Fancy Shirt (a Thomas Dean number my wife bought at steep discount). But we got to talking, and over the course of the next two-plus hours, went on with nary an interruption from a Library Festival celebrant. This was, I would learn, Lennard Zinn.
The ice was mainly broken by a fellow author, a woman who appeared offering us brownies which, based on her appearance, had a better-than-average chance of containing hashish. We politely declined, in my case because I’d shoveled down a foot-long Subway Club with chipotle sauce plus two of three three-for-a-dollar cookies on the ride up.
She forced the issue to no avail, then remarked that “bicycles should be illegal in neighborhoods.” Meaning one would have to drive them to a bike path like kayakers do with streams, apparently. She then described in detail the three-a-side, littering, repairing-in-the-road idiots who apparently pedal in her neck of the woods (and they’re definitely woods — she lives on the winding roads near Evergreen, Colo. — a popular route with road bikers).
I soon knew Lennard as the author of “Zinn and the Art of Mountain Bike Maintenance,”
which had, according to its cover, sold 160,000 copies. That’s more copies, most certainly, than sold in aggregate by the other 77 authors present, and possibly by all authors in the history of Boulder County, excluding Jon Krakauer. Lennard, I would later learn, was on the U.S. cycling team in the late 1970s and early 1980s and, in addition to writing books, runs a company that builds high-end bikes.
So my afternoon was salvaged, noncommercially, by Lennard Zinn and stories of competition and bike materials and the challenge of doing new editions of books when technology is changing but you can’t delete all the old stuff (had not been sitting there, he would have been revising). I learned that titanium is so elastic that, if you smash it into your garage on your car rack, your car, the rack and various bicycle components will be in dire straits, but the titanium frame will be like new.
We talked about residual fitness and the Tour de Colorado finishing up Flagstaff Mountain in Boulder next year and what that will do to the egos of the city’s collective legend-in-their-own-minds cyclists (the fast will forever be slow, and that’s after the pros have raced 100-odd miles). We chuckled at the $5,000 price tag on my engineering model Deep Impact sensor radiator, though a good Zinn bike costs more. And so on.
I sent my neighbor and serial cycle-dabbler Rob Ford a note wondering if he’d like an inscribed copy of the Mountain Bike Maintenance book (this is the bible, Rob told me later), which I bought for him and had Lennard sign. So Lennard sold a book — quite possibly one more than the other 77 authors present could say.
