All the rivers of Bay Area literature seemed to be flowing into this sea of writers, editors, publishers, booksellers, broadcasters, media this and media that, not to mention tattooists, general mischief makers, and anyone who wanted to wear fur. Music, reddish light, orange light, a jubilant line at the bar, prizes and stickers—I overhear someone use the phrase “fascinating subterfuge.” I keep running into friends and not recognizing them in their deerstalkers or smoking with cigarette extenders. I’m wearing too many rings and my fingers might go numb. I keep trying to loosen them. (You can loosen cheap costume rings). So many black lace balloon sleeves! “Hooray for death! Hooray for prizes!” Mark Salinas, King of Caftans, a winner of one of the prizes extracted from Daniel Handler’s dead mother’s house, wafts around behind a silver, sparkly, two dimensional mustache. A crocodile is approaching.
The party’s (real) tattoo artist was the brother of literary legend Stephen Sparks of Point Reyes Books, and was giving the most gorgeous (and real!) Edward Gorey and Transit Books-themed tattoos to all willing guests in attendance. The Sparks brother came out from New Jersey. Stephen, dressed tonight as The Doubtful Guest, let his brother apply his (the brother’s) very first tattoo, which was of the Gorey guest in question, on his calf decades ago, and now there’s at least two new bats on two women before they’re ushering us out the door and collecting unused drink tokens into a small, abandoned pile. I was surprised by the sharp thrill I got at seeing other people commit to the press with their bodies! I briefly considered a Transit Books bicep tat, but the line was long, and I became distracted by a handsome man with a long, period-appropriate, false ginger beard, who, upon closer inspection, revealed himself to be Andrew Sean Greer. The vibe is pure civilized decadence. There are scarves with stripes. There are bandeaus. Handlebar mustachios and monocles. Overheard on the patio: “I've never seen so many fabulous coats! Rethinking my entire outerwear situation now.” Feathers and lace and tweed and vintage furs and the alligator and fringed swaying knots glitter up the parking lot, where Sarah, vegan in blue velvet, eats chocolate sauce in spoonfuls.
The afterparty was so dense with Bay Area book people that the earth’s gravity briefly shifted to revolve around the Transit office, right around midnight. Not so much a cooling down as a concentration of the matter. SW challenged us to come up with the best word or phrase to describe the sensation of "sad but horny." The prize: a stack of quarters left over from the arcade. Winning responses: "melan-horny" and "to come undone." Translators and novelists, journalists and booksellers, designers and editors, all packed in shoulder to shoulder to shoulder so that by the time I got to the stack of freshly delivered pizza boxes, they were already empty. TCF bargained me half her slice of pizza for upgrading my newsletter subscription to paid, and never have I gotten such a sweet deal. You can almost see Bay Area literary culture ramifying and blossoming before your eyes, all the ideas being hashed out and danced around, the chitchat, the inspiration and irony and guarded optimism. So much of Bay Area culture feels like you’re arriving towards the late middle or even the end of something. Not shambolic, but in need of caretaking and renovation. Not so with Transit, and especially not their in-office parties, which have collegiate energy, sweaty and loud. Pizza. Prosecco. And maybe most of the fur coats for miles, gathered in one spot. My five-year-old daughter says I look like a stuffy in mine.
Transit is doing something new, and the founder idiosyncrasies have not been sanded off into lore.
-ACM, JN, RB, LW, MS, TCF