A scene from the glorious existence of an author

Maybe more on SXSW later, but for the moment, this:

It’s Sunday at 5 pm and I’m sitting at the table at the SXSW “bookstore,” where I was signing books. After ten or fifteen minutes, the handful of (charming!) people who actually wanted me to sign a book, or who just wanted to say hello, have moved on.

I’m sharing the table with Christopher Schmitt, Cindy Li and Mark Tramme, authors of Professional CSS: Cascading Style Sheets for Web Design, and Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, of Daily Kos fame, who was signing Taking on the System: Rules for Radical Change in a Digital Era.

This is a lot of people at a small table, and we were pretty crammed in. There was actually a moment when it looked like the “bookstore” minders were going to have me stand, but I got a chair in the end.

Anyway, Markos’ signees had also moved on, so I chatted with him. Super-nice guy. The CSS book co-authors were also really nice.

So we’re all sitting there.

Then David Carson (who had been pointed out to me earlier) ambles over and picks up Buying In. (Carson is “perhaps the most influential graphic designer of the nineties,” per Wikipedia.)

He looks at it — front, back, flaps. He doesn’t look at me.

After about 45 seconds of examination, he puts the book down.

Then he walks away.

Oh well.