SBL Day 2

Lots of meetings with vendors. Here is a brief listing of some highlights of today:

I got an extra allowance from Continuum, so watch for a good sale on some of their books in December.

Olive Tree is doing a real nice implementation on the I-Phone. You should see their Hebrew font. Nice.

We just signed a distribution agreement with Deo Publishing. We will be distributing their titles in North America starting sometime in December. We'll be making a formal announcement in January and running a sale on their titles then.

We had the awarding of the Shalom Paul Festschrift in our booth at noon. The aisle filled up with people and all traffic stopped for a good 15-20 minutes. Dave and I took pictures of it to give to him later. Dave ended up taking most of them because I had a lunch appointment with Michael Thomson of Eerdmans. They have a nice list coming out this Spring. He is now officially an editor, so he won't be in Sales anymore.

We signed up for our booths in New Orleans today. We are taking 8 booths next year, up from 6 this year. We need one extra for Deo, and the other one is so that Jim and I can have meetings without running all over the exhibit hall. Actually, the people in the booth put it a bit differently. Basically they said they were going to put us in leg irons and pin us into that booth so we would be around when people came looking for us :)

The exhibit hall was busy again today, but not quite as busy as yesterday. Because I was running around all day, I didn't get to spend as much time in the booth as yesterday.

Tonight I attended the WJK and Hendrickson receptions. Had some good discussions with people. One of the things we talked about was the following
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I had a chance to pray with some people in the last two days. Seems odd, but that doesn't happen much at a conference on biblical literature. Why is it that it is so uncommon that I have to notice it when it does happen?

On that same note, last night at one of the receptions I was talking to a sociologist who told me that he loves to watch the crowds at the receptions. He said that the dynamic most interesting to him was that when people met the preponderance of the first person pronoun—I'm doing this, I'm doing that. He said he only noticed it at academic conferences. I had to think about that for a minute, but he is right. It isn't the conversation of normal life. Is it narcissistic? I don't know, just asking.

Seems a bit ironic that a discipline dedicated to studying the biblical texts misses the idea of God being the center of the universe. We are the created, he is the creator.

Just an
</idle musing>