Happy Birthday, Book Festival

The festival has vastly changed during its history, from a small festival that took place at the Library to one on the National Mall to one that now occupies the Washington Convention Center — as it will again on Sept. 6. Every year, it has offered a unique distillation of what’s happening in American book culture, free of charge.

Writer Marie Arana served as the festival’s literary director for much of its history, from the 2001 event until the 2022 festival, and she established the festival’s stellar literary reputation.

That distillation happens because, for 25 years now, staff members at the Library of Congress, such as Arana, have taken part in an annual ritual that I suspect not many other people would relish: To get ready to invite writers to the yearly National Book Festival, we spend hours and hours poring over strange little booklets called catalogs issued by American publishers.

The catalogs alert people in the publishing industry — booksellers, librarians, critics and journalists — to which books publishers will release in the upcoming year. Each forthcoming book is described by publishers in rapturous, breathless language; part of our job is deciding which of those books live up to the hype.

But the pleasure after we spend all that time studying up on the catalogs is intense, because that is when we start to see the trends in American thought for the upcoming year.