Your Saturday’s a Boldly Bookish Thing

Wake up in a bed covered with vintage mystery paperbacks, your new audio player vibrating the air with an old Caedmon recording of Sylvia Plath reading her poems, some medium-roast Jamaican Blue Mountain automatically dripping into its glass pot near that battered copy of John Crowley’s Engine Summer …

… that’s one way of beginning a journey of literature before BookPeople’s Carnival of Books starts at 11:30am this Saturday.

And then, there you are, at BookPeople, enjoying the various Special Activities (and free cake) they’ve got scheduled, looking through their vast holdings of so many beautiful books and book-related objects, such a wealth of interesting periodicals for perusing and purchase. And, eventually, it could be that you’ll get an itch for printed treasures with a hyper-local provenance. At which point it’s good to know that the Austin Zine Fest kicks off their Broads Summer Social at Friends & Neighbors, at 6pm this Saturday.

And you can meet and mingle with the women behind the zines – the publishers of Vice Versa Press, Vagina:The Zine, Red Kitty, Peach Fuzz, and more – and pass some quality time among the distaff DIY crowd and the wares that their silkscreens and Goccos and Swinglines hath wrought. And then, maybe you’ll be tired from parsing so much text and you’ll want, instead, to hear some stories, some true-life narratives told aloud by clever and charming people who’ve been around the block a few times and have fascinating tales to tell. How fortunate that The Grownup Lady Story Company not only features, as ever, Annie La Ganga and Rebecca Beegle, but also hosts Ben Steinbauer – starting at 8pm this Saturday.

And there you go, there’s an entire day of bibliophilia for you, citizen, right here in the heart of Austin, Texas.

Bonus: Want a sort of headstart on Saturday's bookish bonanza? The movers and shakers of Raw Paw are celebrating artist Kevin McNamee-Tweed with a new release – of his book of imaginary books – at Farewell Books on Friday night. We reckon you’d like that, too. Especially as you could stop at nearby Cenote immediately afterward and swap heartfelt news over a fine iced mocha. Mmmm, yes, god, that would be just the thing.