Day 3

Monday always feels like a Wednesday. You know that you are over halfway there and can make it to the end. As you can see from the picture, the stack of Sacred Bridge has dropped dramatically. But, what you don't know is that this reflects the backup shipment that we had delivered to us on Monday. So, actually of the 24 that are there, 18 are from the new shipment. Emanuel isn't kidding when he put out the sign "Last Copies." We should be able to sell the remaining 24 copies without a problem.

We had a good year, actually we had a record year for booth sales. Thank you to all of you who bought our books! We have to wait for the later orders to come in, but this year was very good for us.

Last night we had our Eisenbrauns company dinner. Every year we have it on Monday night and review the happenings of the conference, trying to detect trends, things we do right and wrong, what our customers are saying, etc. We do know that we need more space next year! I'm sure you will agree. We will have Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht in our booth next year, so that alone requires more space, and Carta has a strong release schedule for 2006, so they might need 2 booths instead of one. Of course, that many booths opens the possibility of doing something more creative, maybe along the lines of Liturgical Press, or WJK or Fortress. I kind of like the layout of the Continuum booth, with the bookcases along the back wall and the 2x2 tables in the middle.

One thing we have noticed in the last 2 years or so is that we are no longer a small player in the biblical studies/ANE book world. We have "come of age" so to speak and people speak well of us as a major player. Kind of scary in a way, but we will continue to work on deserving the respect of our customers. We like being a family run company where real people answer customer's questions.

Well, those were definitely idle musings, but I must run to the booth, since it is an early day today. Hope everyone has a safe trip home. My flight leaves at 6:00 tonight, so I am hoping to get to see the town for about 2 hours after tearing down the booth. I will try to post pictures of tear down, you should find it interesting to see the transformation and the mad rush to get out :)