Metal Machine had the opportunity to tour the New York Book Expo at the Jacob Javits Center this weekend. Saying that the event was being like a kid in a candy store is an understatement. Any individual could walk into this massive convention and find multiple things to feed their interest. With a wide array of companies promoting their products, it was so easy to get lost in the magic of written word, and then some.
As fate would have it, when walking in and straight lining it to the bathrooms, we ended up directly in front of the comic book section. I swear this was unintentional. The big wigs such as Marvel and DC were not present, but some favorites were there. Dark Horse comics was present giving away copies of their up and coming books with an immaculate copy of Hyrule Historia on display for fans to finger through. Directly next door Image Comics was also handing out posters and promoting their up and coming lines such as Fatale and East West. However the surprise was Boom! Sudios, who handed out over 10 samples of books the they are releasing, such as Max Beimis’ Polarity which is already in is second printing. Boom! has been working closely with musicians lately helping expand their art to a different medium. Claudio Sanchez from Coheed and Cambria has been published through them with his line, The Armory Wars. We had to stray from the comic section or it’s completely possible that we would have been stuck there all day, and so we wandered. Hitting a section of self help book followed by cooking books it became evident that this was going to be a long day of browsing. Moving about we came across a familiar face, Anomaly. This graphic novel is the first of it’s kind. It has a downloadable app that works as an aid in your reading experience. Once the app is downloaded one can aim their camera at a page and the characters from the story will pop up with information about the race of the character and allow you to play with it. So ridiculously awesome. Their newest installment of the series is in the works and it’s going by the name Shifter. This is super exciting. So thus we continued on wielding our handout bags filled to the brim with free books and samples of anything that you could imagine. One thing that made me extremely sad was watching the amount of ebook distributors that were there. I suppose this is something that is just keeping with the times, however the fact that hard copy fiction and non-fiction are starting to die off is a little bit disheartening. This saddened fact was quickly disrupted by the people watching that ensued. There was literally every kind of individual present. Young, old, professional, …not so professional, everyone there loved to read. It was a beautiful conception of gathering for the written word, and if you ask me, that’s probably the most beautiful thing you could ever see.