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)

Friday night's big event, thrown by Knopf, is in a funky converted warehouse on West 28th Street with views of the Hudson. When Akre arrives, she stands around for a bit having what she calls an "Oh jeez, I'm not in my league" moment. There she is, supposed to rub shoulders with the likes of Ken Burns, Carl Bernstein, Michael Ondaatje, Nathan Englander and Mary Gordon, not to mention venerable Picasso biographer John Richardson.

Akre spends a fair amount of time building social capital with fellow book buyers from Wisconsin and California. She isn't too shy, however, to extract some good yarns from Richardson, who charms her with tales of his days in Provence, when the great cubist painter and his entourage used to drop in on him.

Nor is she too tired to repair to a bar called Cowgirl afterward, where she meets some friends.

* * *

Another day, more wandering -- but Saturday's is a bit more purposeful.

Akre has an early meeting, so she doesn't make the Book and Author breakfast featuring Burns, Khaled Hosseini, Lisa See and the elusive Colbert, who had the early-rising crowd in stitches with, among other things, a not-so-gentle putdown of the earnestly long-winded documentary-maker.

She isn't invited to the hush-hush, undisclosed-location lunch with novice young-adult book author Jenna Bush, in town to woo a selection of booksellers and librarians. BEA attendees are mostly from independent bookstores and they lean politically to the left, so Bush's publisher, HarperCollins, knows she'll have some work to do to win them over.

Nor does Akre make it to Saturday's Book and Author lunch, where the headliners are Russell Simmons, Paul Krugman, Alan Alda and Valerie Plame Wilson. America's most famous former clandestine operative draws loud laughter and applause when she shares her to-do list since her recent move to New Mexico:

"Pick up dry cleaning," Wilson deadpans. "Get kids camp stuff at Target. Attend the oral arguments for our civil suit, in which we sue Vice President Dick Cheney. . . . Go to Home Depot. . . . Sue the CIA."

Akre has her own to-do list, which she's written down in a rare spare moment. There are more meetings (including one at lunchtime) and more wandering, this time bearing a list of mostly smaller publishers she wants to check in with.

"Look, hair metal!" she says, stopping to admire a rock-and-roll opus put out by a press called Feral House/Process.

"Nice to meet you, we're Small Beer, have a catalogue," says the man at the booth for another wonderfully named outfit.

But really, there's no time to list all the social capital Akre will acquire before BEA folds its tent on Sunday. There's certainly no time to recount the fabulous tale with which Jamie Byng, publisher of a Scottish press called Canongate, regales her on Saturday afternoon.

Byng's story is about how he came to present a fancy limited edition of a book about cocaine dealing to Queen Elizabeth II.

It is exceptionally long and extremely funny.

And hey -- the publisher has relatives in Bethesda, and he promises to stop by Olsson's sometime.