On the first beautiful spring weekend in Denver, the ninth annual Rocky Mountain Book Festival opened its doors to the public in the brand-new Ritchie Events Center on the University of Denver campus. Was the great weather why so few people ever went inside?

The April 13—14 festival sold slightly more than 3,000 admission tickets at $6 each for the weekend, less than half of 2001 festival attendance of 7,000. In 2000, 8,000 attended, which was a shadow of the book festival's initial years, boasting upward of 40,000 visitors at the peak in 1995.

"I'm told the 2002 festival program was the best ever," visiting author Terry Quin told PW. "Too bad more people weren't here to enjoy it."

Highlights included readings by John Nichols and Gary Hart, standing-room-only local and regional author panels, resources for independent publishing and a talk at the banned books reading by Tattered Cover Book Store owner Joyce Meskis, fresh from her Colorado Supreme Court victory protecting the privacy of customer records.

The Saturday evening capper was a performance of Zelda, Scott and Ernest, featuring George Plimpton as F. Scott Fitzgerald, co-playwright Terry Quin as Ernest Hemingway and Denver entertainer Lannie Garrett as Zelda. The play is told through letters written by the literary figures.

Local publicity for the 2002 Rocky Mountain Book Festival was no less than usual—full media sponsorship by the Denver Post, the cover of the weekend section in the Rocky Mountain News, several radio interviews and a 30-second public service announcement featuring footage from last year's festival on market-leading KUSA-TV.

Denver in Context

Lagging attendance is not isolated to Denver's book fair, according to Christiane Citron, executive director of the Colorado Center for the Book. "People think of Denver as a sports town," Citron told PW, "but Denver also is a book town." Despite public spending on education that puts Colorado in the bottom five states nationally, she said, Colorado ranks among the top five states for per-capita education levels, mostly from migration into Colorado. So the market exists for a book fair.

"See this festival in the context of the publishing industry itself," she said. "The book trade is in the throes of major convulsions, and these changes are affecting local book festivals across the country and worldwide. We're all swimming in the same pool."

"Consolidation among publishers and booksellers means less funds are available for community outreach and marketing," she said. Little or nothing is being budgeted by publishers for donations to sponsor book festival stages or special events. "This helps to explain smaller book festivals in San Francisco, Chicago and other cities recently. We're also seeing the impact on bookseller shows, from regional events like Mountains and Plains to international events like Book Expo America."

"Since publishers and booksellers don't have much money to throw around on marketing," Citron said, "for those of us planning any book festival, it becomes a real challenge of creativity and resourcefulness to figure out how to make it all work, especially if you're a fiscal conservative like me, who says a book event has to pay for itself."

Choices and Consequences

Interviews with Citron plus a dozen participating exhibitors and authors identified four factors affecting Denver that may impact festivals elsewhere.

First, the event in 2002 shifted from March to April, and the weekend of the festival saw the warmest weather of the year so far. "Coloradoans love the outdoors," Citron said, "Maybe we need to go back to doing the festival before spring arrives."

The second cause was the new venue, the third in five years. Since inception in 1993, the book festival was at Currigan Hall downtown. With Currigan slated for demolition, the festival relocated in 1998 to the Denver Merchandise Mart. Hoping for better aesthetics and wanting to hold the festival on a college campus, like the vibrant Los Angeles book festival at UCLA, through the connections of a board member, the 2002 festival took place in the new Ritchie Events Center at the University of Denver.

Third, the Ritchie Center required paid parking, which effectively doubled the ticket price. No parking is allowed in the neighborhoods around the campus without a permit.

Fourth, there were no free tickets, again at the insistence of the Ritchie Center, so no festival passes were distributed by local booksellers this year.

A solution comes from exhibitor Marilyn Auer, editor and associate publisher of Denver-based Bloomsbury Review: "The festival here, like others elsewhere, needs to be subsidized by more of the local cultural facilities tax and by more of the major corporations as way to improve public literacy."