Decatur Book Festival Attracts Record Crowd
Decatur Metro | September 6, 2012The Decatur Book Festival inner circle (Bookzilla included, of course) has just come out of the sweat lodge with an attendance estimate for this year’s fest.
According to Festival Executive Director Daren Wang, 75,000-80,000 people attended the event this past weekend.
“Absolutely the biggest ever.”
Congrats Book Fest!!!
On top of Dragon*Con’s nearly 50,000 paying attendees (not to mention the tens of thousands of parade-watchers on Saturday), Atlanta’s Labor Day weekend is arguably the most epic on the planet. Y/N?
Y
Don’t forget the Tenn-NCSU and Clemson-Auburn football games on Fri/Sat nights, which combined for another 130000 in attendance. There were way too many shades of orange downtown mingling with the DragonCon-ers.
Well done!
Gotta love it!
What is so neat is that, while evidently the DBF is bigger than ever, it felt smoother and less crowded than recent years. Someone is doing an excellent job with logistics.
That was my observation and also that of people I talked to. I think having the vendor booths arranged along Ponce and Clairemont like the Arts Fest had a lot to do with that. I also heard good comments about the scheduling, despite several SRO presentations.
Scheduling was uniform this year without many, if any, overlapping slots. That worked much better. Even though overlapping slots might allow for more sessions, it makes it very hard on the attendee trying to plan their schedule and results in folks are coming and leaving during the middle of sessions which is disruptive. There’s always been SRO situations; it felt like there were less this year. That’s about having enough big venues and predicting who would draw the biggest crowds, an art form, I’m sure. If the festival gets bigger, I guess there will have to be more concurrent sessions to spread out the crowds more. Makes it harder to plan and breaks your heart when two sessions you are dying to see occur at the same time, but overall a good thing.
I vote for a third day or twice a year DBFs but I know that’s just a pipedream!
Thinking about it, I bet some of it was due to the new location of the children’s venue. Spread things out a bit more?
And the teen stage, which was more popular than I’ve ever seen it.
Agree. The old plaza location was cute but children milling and darting around did not mix well with being at the intersection of adults determinedly tramping from one venue to another during the 15 minute breaks between sessions. It was too congested. Also that location was too hot for kids. Hot concrete + kids + waits between sessions = whining. A larger tree-shaded location for the kids stage is a better idea.
Teen stage did seem dynamic this year. I know some CSD teachers were promoting it but there were lots of teens there from other schools too. Outdoor location is great for adolescents who approach new experiences cautiously, circling it a bit and looking it over before committing and sitting down or participating. Previous indoor locations may have intimidated some teens who wanted to stay invisible and inconspicuos.
Agreed. Though the smell of mulch in the Georgia heat was a bit much to take at times. Olivia the pig said she didn’t mind though, so I shut up about it.
I noticed the smell too. I’m glad it was mulch. I was thinking dumpster. Can’t have everything.
If we’re talking about the smell near the Children’s Stage, it was the ginkgo tree behind it on Clairemont.
Really?
Didn’t know trees could smell bad. Always learning on Decatur Metro! Interesting notes about gingko trees from gardenguides.com:
“Female ginkgo trees produce fruits that resemble cherries or small plums. When the fruit drops from the tree and begins to rot, it smells like rancid butter. Male plants do not produce fruit, so they are most commonly planted.” (So one on Clairemont is female? Why wasn’t a male planted instead? And why is my botany so rusty?–I didn’t remember that plants can be male and female like animals.)
“Gingko trees were the only trees to survive the atomic blast on Hiroshima. They are now part of memorial of the disaster.”
Do trees hate books? That would be almost as upsetting as how they rudely block solar panels.
Of course trees hate books. Wouldn’t you hate something made out of your brothers and sisters?
Do you think the trees know that I only buy books made from organic, free range trees that are non-GMO and were treated kindly through life and given a quick and painless death?
And, with kudos to past program directors who birthed and grew the event, I think the success particularly of the younger groups is due in part to Terra Elan McVoy, who is probably a little more in tune with them.
We worship Terra. She has been special from her day one at LSOS through all her successes and incarnations. But also kudos to everyone else involved with DBF from inception to now. In a world that seems to be going downhill in so many ways (although I hear that’s been said for thousands of years already), seeing our “it takes a village” community of literature lovers plant and cultivate the DBF has been rewarding.
Mary Flad is the queen of logistics for the DBF. Thank her if you see her.
All those people and still the free on weekends County Courthouse parking deck was only about half full at a peak hour on Saturday and is only steps from the heart of the festival.
Who says Decatur doesn’t have enough parking?
The people who can’t find it. A combination of signage and improved traffic flow could lead the non-local masses to parking nirvana (adjacent, plentiful, and free!). If you are not local (and I used to be one of those), just driving around downtown Decatur may not lead you to stumble across the entrance to the county deck.
A few of these simple signs around town would REALLY help.
http://www.clker.com/clipart-parking-sign.html