We couldn't have done it without you

I can't say enough about how well everything went this past weekend at the first annual Chestertown Book Festival. I guess we were all planning for the worst-case-scenario, but it felt as though everything just fell into place. Here are a few fun numbers to provide proof of this declaration:

After totaling the number of people in attendance at each of our 38 events, we had a turnout of just under 1,000 (non-unique visitors, of course--that's web-speak for repeat attendees).

And when I emptied out the two donation boxes that we had carried around with us on Friday evening and all day Saturday, I tell you, it was like Christmas morning. All together, people donated $420 for the funding of next year's Festival!

If you'd like more visual gratification, there are pictures from the Festival on The Chestertown Spy and on volunteer photographer Nick Smerker's Flickr page.

Our participants were fabulous, our volunteers were wonderful, our venue hosts were fantastic, and our visitors were, well, the perfect audience. Thank you to everyone who helped us to make this possible! You did such a great job that I think we now have no choice but give a repeat performance next year and the year after and as long as we can, I think.

P.S. we're not done yet

Here are two more events that didn't make it to the official Schedule of Events (only because they were added after our ideal cut-off date). Take a look:

Local author Terwana Brown will give a reading and signing for her upcoming book Living My Life in Reverse.

Saturday, November 14th
Bookplate, 112 S. Cross St.
10:00-11:00 a.m.

Poet Robert Earl Price will give a poetry reading and book signing. He is the author of poetry collections Blues Blood and Wise Blood.

Saturday, November 14th
Christ United Methodist Church, 401 High St.
2:00-3:00 p.m.

The best umbrellas are non-profit ones

It's official! The Chestertown Book Festival is now a non-profit, tax-exempt organization, thanks to the Mid-Shore Community Foundation. Instead of us having to spend the ridiculous amount of money and time and head-pain required to file the paperwork to become a 501(c)(3), Mid-Shore pulls us under the large umbrella of their established 501(c)(3) status and they also help us manage and grow our funds. This is a huge relief for everyone here on the ChesBookFest committee. Thank you Mid-Shore!

And now we are only a week away from the festival. The countdown has begun!

In this Spirit of Volunteerism

We now have the Schedule of Events finalized! Posters and brochures are out among the waiting public.

Next is the task of recruiting free help. I mean, this committee is working for free--or, I guess you could say, for the love of the thing--and we hope that there are others who feel the same inclination. The whole idea behind this festival is for-the-love-of-books, and so we are now calling all book-lovers!

We will be having an All-Volunteer Interest Meeting this Thursday, October 22nd at 5:00PM at the Kent County Public Library in Chestertown (in the meeting room). All are welcome!

Our Fountainhead: The Face of a Festival

We finally have our official logo! This image was designed and drawn by local artist Paul Hostetler. I think it's got both spunk and class--a good representation of who we are and who we aim to be as celebrators of local literary life. A lot of thought went into the creation and selection of this iconic image, on the parts of both the artist and the festival committee. We hope that everyone else likes it, too!

It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like a Book Festival

So we've been working hard the past few weeks and we've made a bit of progress. Check out the new authors list in our left margin! All of these guests are the ones that have confirmed with us that they will, in fact, be coming. We still have a few from which we are waiting to hear back--so the list may even get longer.

Right now we are trying to find out which of the Downtown Chestertown vendors (especially restaurants) will be willing to host a festival event. We want all the author-venue pairings to be good matches, atmospherically speaking.

In other news, we have a logo design in the works! Local artist Paul Hostetler has presented us with some design sketches and we hope to have the final draft ready for exploitation sometime soon. We're thinking posters, T-shirts . . . coffee mugs, maybe? There are loads of possibilities, but it's all down to what we can afford for this first year. We have our ambitions, though.

The Inaugural Post for the Inaugural Celebration

This blog will be dedicated to the first ever book festival in Chestertown, Maryland. Yes, people on the Eastern Shore do read books. Don't act so surprised. As a lifelong Chestertown citizen, I can tell you that this historical town has grown to become a hub of literary activity. From the writers drawn in by the Washington College Sophie Kerr speaker series, to the events sponsored by our numerous local independent bookstores, and especially the local writers that are making their way in the contemporary publishing world (not to mention our wonderful, newly-renovated public library), bibliophiles in the surrounding area know that Chestertown is the place to go to get involved in literary life, even beyond the local. We have watched from afar as Baltimore and Washington put on their annual book festivals and many of us have even trekked across the Bay to attend them. And with the same competitive spirit that inspired our Tea Party-rivalry with Boston, our local literary leaders decided that the time had come that we had our own yearly celebration of the written word. Excited, yet? We are. Our inaugural festival is to be a one-day event, planned for Saturday, November 14, 2009. We hope that next year it will grow even larger. For more details (as we get them), check in with this blog and the official website for ChesBookFest!