Decatur Square Quiet After Monster of a Book Festival

Alice Murray was a founding member of the board of the AJC Decatur Book Festival and currently serves as board president.

All’s quiet on the Decatur Square. The tents are gone and Bookzilla has returned to his bunker to await another AJC Decatur Book Festival (AJC DBF).

As planners and volunteers of the largest independent book festival in the country revel in a successful event and recover from a busy weekend, AJC DBF Executive Director Daren Wang reflects on the sixth annual event.

 Wang says both attendance and book sales were up about 15 percent from 2010, and estimated the crowds at between 70,000 and 75,000.

In an email to the festival planning committee, Wang writes, “Well, you guys are the only ones that know what effort it really takes to bring 75,000 people or so to a city this size, to feed them, to make them happy and entertained, to let them know where to go and how to get there, where to find their lost keys or books or children, how to get them power and water and shelter.

“Each year this team builds a new city within the confines of an existing one, and you all do it quickly and seamlessly, smiling most of the time.

“And then tens of thousands of people come during metro Atlanta’s busiest weekend, and become our happy citizens. They can do all kinds of things on Labor Day weekend. They can go to their beach house, or their mountain house, or they can go to the Georgia Dome for the Dogs or DragonCon or the Braves game or to half a dozen other great events around town. But they come here, because of what you all do.”

Within hours of the close of the festival Sunday evening, praise started rolling in from attendees and authors.

One noteworthy quote came from author Jeff VanderMeer who wrote on his web site, “We had a busy weekend, bouncing back and forth between DragonCon and the Decatur Book Festival. DragonCon was fun although chaotic and hectic, and the Decatur Book Festival was an absolute delight. One of the best-run, best-thought-out book festivals we’ve encountered. Great staff, great organization, imaginative panels, engaged readers attending, and they took good care of us. We’d go back in a heartbeat — might even just drive up to take it in as a reader, too.”

 Wang expects Bookzilla to spend the next year in his writing studio updating his memoir of book festival events and getting ready for another extravaganza on Labor Day weekend 2012.

 But the Decatur Square won’t be quiet for long. City workers are already setting up for Saturday night’s concert — part of a month of free 7 p.m. Saturday Concerts on the Square sponsored by the Decatur Business Association.