Howdy! It's 4 PM on Wednesday afternoon, and the excitement is steadily building in the massive San Diego Convention Center as the dealers and publishers rush to finish constructing their exhibit stands. This process all began nearly 36 hours ago, with an incredibly long double line of trucks of all sizes slowly creeping their way into the cavernous loading docks. I was in line with our rented mini-van full of computers and supplies at 7:45 AM yesterday. Two hours later, I was still quite a distance from the unloading area when the dockmaster suddenly pulled his little golf cart up next to my window, and told me to pull into a side unloading area. Five minutes later, my pallets were whizzing into the convention center on a couple of fork lifts. That simple act of kindness saved me at least another hour of waiting in line! (click on image for larger view) I mention the waiting in line to unload because I want to give everyone a real sense of the frustrations and hard work that goes into mounting a large display in a national convention center. Over the 31 years I have exhibited in San Diego I have seen the complexity of the show grow, and any number of new onerous problems arise. The great news about this year is that our freight arrived just fine, our banners were hung, we got the right number of fixtures, and the initial response to the $100,000 in trade paperbacks display has been very positive. About the only negatives have been that one of the six new PC's we purchased for the show arrived broken, and that Diamond scrambled the books they sent us so badly that it has taken over 40 man-hours to get them back into alphabetic order by publisher. These aggravations will all be forgotten by tomorrow, however, as the positive energy of the show quickly helps mitigate the difficulties we have to work through to get our booth looking nice. Since I haven't yet had a chance to walk around the convention, I don't have any photos yet of other booths. Those will start appearing in tomorrow's newsletter. I did take a few shots of our booth as it was being constructed, however, so I am providing you with those as links. The thing to bear in mind about our booth this year is that we've intentionally gone with a very simple block and board shelving. My thought in doing this was that since we're trying to establish an image of having many thousands of inexpensive books, paying to freight our fancy custom bookshelves to the show might actually be counterproductive. I intentionally chose to instead make our block and board shelving look very bargain basement. I refuse, however, to go with straight undecorated block and board, as that is just a little too low rent of an image for a big convention. As an alternative, we decided to cover all our raw components with red vinyl cloth. Pam came up with this excellent idea, and it has drawn quite a few positive comments. (click on image for larger view) Aside from working 12 hours a day, we've also had time for a couple of big family-style meals. Last night, after we finished working on the booth, I took 16 people to the Spaghetti Factory directly across from the convention center. Then my daughter Rowan, her good friend Rachel, and Terry Moore's son Trey dragged me off for a brief walk in the starlit darkness on the beach in Coronado. That was fun! I took one picture of Rowan with my little digital camera that turned out very cool, with a very strange moray background. That's it for today's report. I need to get of the computer now, as the room will be open to the public in just a few minutes. I don't want to forget to remind everyone about our special San Diego 50%-80% off all back issue sale that's in effect right now. We're going to be promoting that sale very heavily here at the convention, so don't be surprised if we sell out of a few scarce books from our online inventory by Saturday afternoon. If you want to work on your collection this week, place your online order as quickly as you can, while our selection is still the greatest! (click on image for larger view) Happy collecting! Chuck Rozanski, President - Mile High Comics, Inc. Thursday Pictures Truck Line! Will and Steve bringing our booth in. Bill and Sean, our Trades arrive! Rowan, Pam and Rachel begin to create our booth. DC Booth coming alive! Pam starts making our booth fabulous! Where do we start? Bill starts to put the trades in order. Will setting up our booth. Fans start to arrive, outside the convention center! Rachel and Rowan at the beach