LitFest...Who needs Kindle?

My roommate, Rebecca, told me about all the great summer festivals that take place in Chicago.  Today, I had my first experience at a downtown event, and I have to say, it was better than I’d expected.

LitFest is a tradition for the first week of June here.  A few city blocks are barricaded off, leaving plenty of room for major bookstores, presses and independent sellers to peddle pages and pages of classic and obscure titles.  While people may say the written word is dead, the few thousand people who turned out today would disagree. 

I was there for work, which gave me the opportunity to talk with a ton of people.  One couple I met had road tripped it from Iowa with family.  This was an annual tradition for them, not unlike the couple that exchanged vows at the festival today, commemorating the place and weekend they met a few years ago. 

Each booth offered a different selection of work, from comics and Shakespeare, to literary classics and Sex & the City.  I spent some time at the booth dedicated entirely to books about Ireland, and while there were some great options, it was not nearly as cool as the booth of old TIME magazines and postcards.  Yup, postcards.  There were thousands, even an entire section boasting pictures of insane asylums.  The man running the booth said his father had spent years collecting them, pair that collection with others bought from estate sales and random shops…and you, too, could have a postcard booth at LitFest. 

Far from a typical library, LitFest offered food booths, wine tasting, beer, music and poetry readings.  The festival continues tomorrow, so I encourage you to head down to Dearborn Street to check it out!

Cheers!