Decatur Book Festival, Labor Day Weekend, 2013

The Decatur Book Festival is the largest independent book festival in the country. Since its launch, more than 1,000 world-class authors and hundreds of thousands of festival-goers have crowded the historic downtown of Decatur, GA.

This year's festival broke all records for attendance. Here are a few examples of what I saw as I wandered about the festival on a beautiful Saturday morning.

Here is the main Common in downtown Decatur.

The Atlanta Writers Club booth always had a crowd of curious people wanting to learn more.

This stall had an unusually long line!

Live story time. This guy was great, he had everybody enthralled!

The Center for Puppetry Arts was also a big hit.

Oh those Scots!

 

Celebrated Grove/Atlantic author Margaret Wrinkle was there talking about her book WASH to a sold out crowd.

 

The advantages of being small and having 
your father bring you to the Children's Hour.

I liked the fine print.

Another Grove/Atlantic author who stole the show was Laura Lee Smith. 
She spoke about "secrets" 
and how important they were to the success of a good novel. 
Her hit book, Heart of Palm, is filled with them.

Kids were a huge part of the success of the festival. 
They all had a grand time.

This sculpture is entitled Celebration  by Gary Price.

This was at the back of a booth -- I have no idea what the point was, I just had to take a picture.

An attendee taking a break next to another one of the many sculptures that dot downtown. This one's called Valentine, by George Lundeen.

"Hey mom, it's squishy!"

 

Finally, I had the distinct pleasure of dining with (L to R) the book reviewer from the Atlanta Journal, Gina Webb, Pulitzer Prize winning author Robert Olen Butler, here to talk about his latest Christopher Marlowe Cobb thriller 

The Star of Istanbul, Heart of Palm author Laura Lee Smith and Margaret Wrinkle, author of WASH.