Dave Eggers at BookPeople

Okay, seriously: What’s up with you Austinites and your wristbands? Apparently Dave Eggers, founder of McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, is going to be in town doing a reading at local book-fave BookPeople on Wednesday, March 3, and only those with wristbands are allowed to join the book-signing line. To get a wristband, you must have purchased a copy of either The Wild Things or Zeitoun (his two latest releases) from BookPeople. Seems like a bit of a scam to me, but I guess Eggers is such a big deal that he simply cannot be bothered to sign any of that old rubbish he wrote, back in the day, like a humble little ol’ thing that launched his career called A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

Dave Eggers at the 2007 Brooklyn Book Festival (photo by David Shankbone, via Wikimedia)

The other reason I think this wristband-for-book-signing-privileges thing is kind of crappy? “Kicking off the event today will be Austin resident (and former BookPerson) Bill Cotter reading from his recently published McSweeney’s book Fever Chart.” Granted, I’d never heard of Bill Cotter until I read this sentence, from the BookPeople blog announcing the event, but shouldn’t this poor dude get a shot at having some books of his own signed? [To be fair: Crack Books blog commenter Summer noted, on the original post, that "Bill Cotter has already had an event for his book at BookPeople, where, like all BookPeople events, you had to have bought the book at the store in order to have it signed. This is just a bonus because he’s a friend of Eggers. By reading in front of Dave’s audience, he’ll probably sell a bunch of people on his (amazing) book."] I mean, where’s the requirement that people need to have bought HIS book, in advance, to get a shot at having the big man sign? It’s not very egalitarian, is what I’m saying. Sure, everybody knows Eggers is this Literary Celebrity who requires the special Celebrity Treatment (i.e. picking out all the green M&Ms and only allowing Fiji water in his pre-reading dressing room and all manner of attendant nonsense), but would it kill ya to push a local, currently rather unknown author’s work equally hard? It just seems like the right thing to do, coming from a local bookstore that likes to trumpet its support for Austin-based authors.

So people, if you’re going to the Dave Eggers signing, grab a copy of Bill Cotter’s book too, and be nice enough to gush over it while you’re there, willya?

BookPeople is located at 603 N. Lamar Blvd, in Austin, Texas. This post was originally featured on the literary review blog Crack Books.