‘In Memory’ in Cambridge
9-12-2015 18:22
It’s already been a week and a half since I flew to England for the official launch of In Memory on November 28. We had arranged a room in the Central Library in Cambridge, where we presented the book to the library’s visitors with nine of the seventeen authors. We chose Cambridge because the charity our proceeds are going to is based there, and because about half of the authors live in Great Britain, meaning we could get the largest possible number of writers together this way.
So there we stood on the third floor of the library, with a pile of books and matching bookmarks, with nine people from England, Scotland, Belgium, Germany, and of course the Netherlands, who had never met each other in the flesh before. The recipe for a somewhat chaotic, but very fun afternoon!
F.l.t.r.: Charlotte Slocombe (front), a representative of Alzheimer’s Research UK (back), Laura May, Michael Schaefer (back), me (front), Simon Evans (back), Caroline Friedel, Steven McKinnon, Robert McKelvey, and Peter Knighton.
We handed out many bookmarks (and hid a few in Terry Pratchett books), and sold all of the books we brought, most of them naturally full of autographs. Furthermore, Laura, Robert, Michael and Charlotte were interviewed for the local radio! The interview is available online on Cambridge 105’s website.
It wasn’t always easy to get people to look at our book, but especially once we figured out who had a talent for enthusiastically approaching passers-by and who didn’t (guess which group I belong to… hint: it’s not the first), we did have visitors regularly. Time flew by, and soon we had to clear away our stuff and our anthology’s launch was over.
Busy signing books!
The next challenge was finding a place that still had enough room for a large group to have lunch; apparently not an easy task on a Saturday afternoon in the Cambridge City Centre! It ended up being a late lunch, which felt like dinner because it had gotten dark outside, and because afterwards, everyone went their own way. But my weekend in Cambridge was not over yet: my sister Roos had come to the book launch, and we spent most of Sunday catching up and looking around the city, both from the streets and the river.
That night I found myself, after some trouble with a delayed flight, back home in Culemborg. It was a short, but great weekend on the other side of the Channel. Although it’s still a shame that I’ll probably never meet my fellow authors from Canada, America, Australia, New-Zealand and Malaysia. Unfortunately the world hasn’t become that small yet!