The Skim Trade

Alexis Akre, the head book buyer for Olsson's, checks out the directory to BookExpo 2007 at the Javits Center in New York. (By Helayne Seidman For The Washington Post)

Oops.

Before long she was a store manager. Last December she became head buyer and general manager for books. That future she was going to figure out seems to have taken care of itself.

As for the capital a better-paying career might have brought -- well, she may have to make do with the social kind.

* * *

"This is the senseless wandering portion of BEA," Akre explains.

It's Friday morning and she's just hit the main floor at the Javits Center. Her plan is to cruise the seemingly endless aisles and see what serendipity will bring.

The first familiar face she sees belongs to Geoffrey Hughes, who's in the Harcourt booth. Akre greets him warmly but doesn't even think about buying anything. He'll come to Olsson's later.

"You and I are going to sit down soon and talk about cabbages and kings," Hughes tells her.

She heads down a center aisle, turning into a side aisle only when she sees something that catches her eye. Ducking into the Hachette Book Group, she gets caught in a crush of ambling conventioneers. Her Olsson's colleagues Tony Ritchie and Andrew Getman, who are wandering with her, are temporarily lost to sight.

"I have no idea where we are," Akre says a minute later, pondering a BEA-provided map with tiny print.

No matter. Wandering on, she spies Ingram Publisher Services and her stride gets purposeful. Ingram, one of the major book distributors, does a lot of business with Olsson's. She makes a date to come back later and talk.

She zips past a display for "The Dorm Room Diet Planner" ("I figured I'd skip that one") and loses Ritchie and Getman again. When they reappear, Ritchie is clutching a holiday title called "Alien Xmas."