Ah, The Fall. The Bookfairest Time of Year in NOLA.

As I write this, we are four short days away from the 2009 edition of the New Orleans Bookfair, one of the best fests devoted to grassroots, independent writing and publishing that you will find anywhere. Lots of locals, as well as cutting-edge publishers like AK, MIT, Last Gasp. Plenty of readings, although the website (nolabookfair.com) doesn't have a schedule listed at this time. And Deep South Samizdat Books will be in the house. Bookfair venues are located around the 500-600 blocks of Frenchmen St., in the Marigny neighborhood, just outside of the French Quarter, and Deep South Samizdat will be conducting business from inside Lazziza, at 2106 Chartres St., which intersects with Frenchmen.

This will be my sixth Bookfair, having first attended as a vendor in 2004, just a few months after moving back to Louisiana from Oregon. I had worked at Powell's Books in Portland for six years, and was dipping my toes into the waters of guerrilla bookselling, independent of a brick-and-mortar location. The Bookfair has always emphasized its radical political bonafides, and I was just coming out of the political hothouse of Portland, eating and breathing union and homeless and poverty activism on a daily basis. We were in Shreveport, finding our way in a political culture that was a tad less highly charged, shall we say, even in a presidential election season featuring that king of charisma, John Kerry (the man who could make Hubert Humphrey look like Fighting Bob LaFolette [and if you don't get that reference, you need to march yourself over to the Deep South Samizdat book table at 2106 Chartres St. on Saturday]).

This was when the Bookfair was still at Barrister's Gallery, and I immediately found a bookselling home. I have since expanded my guerrilla bookselling empire to various markets in New Orleans and the temporary autonomous entrepreuneurial zone of the internet (at amazon.com/shops/deepsouthsamizdatbooks), but always plan my fall around the Bookfair.

Of course, it was just one year after my first Bookfair that Katrina struck, with the 2005 set approximately two months after. If my recollection is correct, it was originally cancelled, then reinstated. My wife and I had only been as far as Jefferson Parish since the hurricane, clearing awaying downed branches at my in-law's Metairie home, spared by the worst. It was a sobering experience driving into the city, and even more sobering were the stories by the relatively sparse crowd, subdued numerically and emotionally. Books are, of course, some of the most fragile possessions in the face of any natural disaster, and it was as moving as anything I have done as a bookseller to be able to provide a few replacements of lost treasures. It was also humbling to see the inspiring work that had been done by the volunteers, many of whom had tapped time and energy reserves unknown to most of us. Just two months after.

Anyway, the Bookfair means a lot to me, not least because my local bookselling buddy Donald Miller would tell me every year that we needed to move down here from Shreveport, that the opportunities were plentiful. He was right, of course, as Deep South Samizdat Books can be found at the following markets in the next two months:

Nov. 7 New Orleans Bookfair
Nov. 14 Broad St. Flea Market
Nov. 21 Elysian Fleas
Dec. 5 Freret Market
Dec. 12 Freretstivus Market and Broad St. Flea Market (augghh!)
Dec. 19 Elysian Fleas

And for those of you shopping online, look at the above-posted url for some exciting new additions, including: several volumes by hard-boiled African-American crime fiction master Chester Himes; works by Alain Robbe-Grillet, Primo Levi, Anna Deveare Smith, Blaise Cendrars, Guillermo Gomez-Pena, Ayn Rand; and biographical works about Che Guevara, Angela Davis and Akira Kurosawa. Check it out.