At the Winter Arts Show 2018

Peschel Press has been participating in the Hershey Winter Arts and Crafts Show for several years now; our first year was November 2014.

This year, November 3, 2018, was our fifth year with the show. Five years! It’s a milestone for a tiny press like ours. When we started, we had only a few titles to our name. “Writers Gone Wild” was our biggest book. We had the three annotated mysteries too. That would be “Whose Body?” by Dorothy Sayers, “The Mysterious Affair at Styles” by Agatha Christie, and “The Secret Adversary,” also by Agatha Christie. For those of you who don’t know, these are deluxe, illustrated, and completely annotated editions. You get the complete text and another 50,000 some words (give or take) of explanations about what you’re reading.

We did not, way back then, have any fiction of our own.

We have a lot more titles now. We’ve got the 223B series (almost complete!), the Rugeley Poisoner series about the notorious William Palmer, “The Dictionary of Flowers and Gems,” “Fed, Safe, and Sheltered,” “The Casebook of Twain and Holmes,” and “The Bride From Dairapaska.”

We can now easily fill a nine-foot table with our books.

The butterscotch crunchies again make their appearance and so the my cloth grocery bags, which is what got us into the show in the first place.

Now that we’ve done the show five times (along with a number of other shows), we’ve gotten much better at our procedure. We know what to bring with us and we’ve stopped bringing things like the baker’s rack. We didn’t need it and it only got in the way.

Doing this show five years in a row has also let us see the changes in the Hershey Winter Arts and Crafts show. Every year, it’s a bit bigger. This year, the official map lists 174 vendors. One hundred and seventy-four vendors! This is a huge number of vendors. All of us fill Hershey High School, up and down the corridors, the cafeteria, the entry lobbies, and the large group instruction room. I suppose eventually we’ll have to expand into the gymnasium when the number of vendors overflows the hallways.

We’ve seen a number of the same people year after year, while at the same time, new people come in too. The price is right: $55 for a 6-by-12-foot space and it’s inside too. This can be an important consideration in November in Central Pa.

I had the chance to walk around and see what was new in the crafting world (snowmen made of puffs of white nylon netting) and talk to lots of people. Bill walked around and took many, many pictures. As always, the Winter Arts and Crafts Show had just about every imaginable kind of vendor. Jewelry of course (all different), potters, painters, crafts of every description, wonderful candies, candles; whatever it was, someone there had it.

We did pretty well. We sold books which is not a foregone conclusion at a Winter Arts and Crafts show. Folks who go to craft shows aren’t necessarily looking to buy books; they expect to buy snowmen and jewelry and handmade sugar scrubs.

We had, as always, a good time talking to shoppers. The people-watching is terrific as you can imagine. Everyone there was enjoying the day.

The Vendors We Met

A few vendors I want to highlight, among the many, many wonderful stalls:

Julia’s Cozy Covers. Julia is a charming, go-getting young lady, about 12 now, and she runs her own sewing business making flannel pillowcases. This was her second year at the show.

Patti Tingen was here too. She’s a local, indie writer from the Lititz area. You can get her books from Aaron’s book store in Lititz.

Sheri Queen was there too. She writes a range of paranormal, contemporary fantasy and she had those books with her. She also, along with her daughter makes a variety of old books repurposed into really charming journals along with some terrific steampunk jewelry. Her website lists her event schedule so you see her in person as well.

The only difficulty we had with the show was the scheduling. In years past, Peschel Press participated in the York Book Expo, an excellent celebration of books and the literary life hosted by Demi Stevens in York, Pa.

Sadly, this year Demi hosted the York Book Expo on the same date as the Winter Arts and Crafts Show. Talented though we are, we couldn’t be in two places at once and so we had to choose. Hershey won out because we did not want to lose our premium spot, booth #91. Our booth is ideally located at the intersection of two main hallways so we get a lot of foot traffic walking by us on their way to someplace else in the maze of hallways at the high school. If we had said “no” to the Winter Arts and Crafts show, who knows where we would have ended up.

Next year, we hope to be able to do both shows, and we’ll have even more books to show off.

I hope you can join us and see what we’ve got that’s new.