Hundreds of fans jammed the book department at Harrods department store in London to snap up more than 1,000 autographed copies of actress Joan Collins’s first novel, Prime Time.… A Harrods spokeswoman said the sale of 1,000 autographed books in an hour—some signed in advance—was a record for the store, breaking a record set just two weeks ago when actor Kirk Douglas’s autobiography, The Ragman’s Son, sold about 900 copies when he spent an hour autographing books. —Associated Press
CHUCK Barris, creator of The Gong Show, his face set hard, signed his warmup books outside a Waldenbooks in Houston. Yes. He was spelling his name right, with two rs. His hand was moving well. He felt good—tense but good. He took a deep breath, crushed out a cigarette, and went inside and started autographing copies of You and Me Babe. An hour later, he had autographed over six hundred copies. At this time, 1974, this was a feat that was considered unapproachable. Today, schoolchildren can autograph six hundred books in an hour. Many can autograph eight hundred, and scores in the low nine hundreds are commonplace. The incredible has become the expected. The outlandish has become the normal. The weird has become the everyday.
Yet surely there is some limit, some barrier beyond which book signers cannot go. History has not been kind to those who have predicted limits. Hans Fleeder, a University of Colorado psychology-of-the-hand expert, predicted in 1966 that Jackie Susann’s mark of two hundred and eighty-six signings would stand forever. Within a year, Susann’s mark had been broken over a dozen times. Today, tapes of sixties-era book signings look like slow motion.
We look at them and think, Too slow. But we also think, How fast can we go?
For years, this question was a purely hypothetical one: Ask fifty-nine “experts” and you might receive fifty-nine “expert” opinions, along with a great deal of tedious conversation. Today, however, we seem on the verge of a breakthrough. Today, for the first time, we seem close to an answer to that age-old question How many books can a celebrity author sign in an hour?
There are many facets to this inquiry. Let us examine them.
The world population has tripled in this century. This has had an enormous impact. The equation is simple: The more people, the more paper. The more paper, the more printing. The more printing, the more words. The more people, paper, printing, and words, the more books, the more chances to exceed book-signing limits.
Improved nutrition is also a factor here. For example, Jackie Susann often ate a breakfast of a chocolate doughnut and a cup of Sanka. Today’s fast signer wouldn’t dream of starting a day without a vast array of complex carbohydrates and carefully administered training fluids. A few years ago, in a famous incident, Sidney Sheldon, minutes before a signing, ate a Pop-Tart and drank a Dr. Brown’s. Fifteen minutes later, no one could read his signature.
Forty minutes later, Sheldon began to sign the name “Rosemary Rogers” in his books. An EMS unit was called, and the exhausted creator of I Dream of Jeannie was rushed to the nearest hospital and swiftly hooked up to an IV drip. Today, thankfully, Sheldon is all right, but his story stands as a sad reminder of what a book signer faces when he truly “goes for it.”
Perhaps nowhere else has modern technology had such a great impact. It is well known that Erich Segal experimented with a primitive felt-tip pen (actually a Q-tip coated with some foreign substance) as early as 1970, but it wasn’t until the Mario Puzo era that felt-tip pens became the norm.
Today, the felt-tip pen threatens to become as archaic as a big Mississippi riverboat. Just last summer, a team at Caltech came up with a pen they called, whimsically, the CR-319. The CR-319 was so technologically advanced that it had to be scrapped after it broke the sound barrier during a signing at B. Dalton’s in Cincinnati. They’ve gone back to the drawing board on the CR-319, yet experts still predict that we will see faster pens in the future.
“It’s inevitable,” says Gaylord Tendon, of Yo Labs. “Fast pens are sexy, and people will always be attracted to them.”
The great unknown factor in book signing has been “hushed up” in most book-signing circles until recent months, and is still largely unknown among the public at large: steroids. No one knows just how pervasive the use of these “signing enhancers” may be, but highly placed members of the Authors Guild agree that it is probably a common practice.
“Anytime you’d see an author come in for a signing with a really big hand, you had to be suspicious,” says Gene Fibula, owner of the Booknook in Madison, Wisconsin. “You’d see more and more of these authors—little skinny guys with these gigantic metacarpals. You knew what was happening, but you never said anything. Why alarm the crowd?”
Testing has proved impracticable. Authors are not stupid; they know how to mask the use of steroids. In a highly publicized event in 1987, Erica Jong was nabbed for blood doping, but the matter was dropped when further tests indicated that laboratory machines had been reacting to her nail polish. But most book signers, tragically, will continue to abuse almost anything modern science will make available to them.
The human factor will be involved in the future of book signing no matter what agents and oddsmakers may predict. Book signing is exclusively a human activity. No gazelles, for instance, do it. Knowing what we know about humans, it’s hard not to imagine a scene like this:
Judith Krantz is at the mall ten minutes early. Nervously she twists her head one way, then the other. She extends her fingers. Yes, she nods; she is ready.
She puts her hands on her handler’s shoulders. Krantz and her entourage enter the arena and move through the wildly excited crowd. She sits down at the desk, half hidden by the mountains of volumes that tower above her on all sides, and takes out her pen. She turns and whispers to her handler. It is a harsh whisper—harsh from intensity:
“I’m going to sign these books.”
It’s not hard to imagine an author like Krantz, on a perfect day, in the best of shape and with the best equipment, shattering our concept of book signing.
1988