"It was the best of times, it was the best of times"

There are some websites that were just made to have ebook imprints. Like McSweeney's. Or Salon.com. Or Emily Gould's thing. But more importantly Thought Catalog. Yes, the post-tween insta-nostalgia festival was basically designed to sell books for $1.99 from authors who think they've written the next Perks of Being a Wallflower-meets-Lady Chatterley's Lover.

And you know what? We would read these books. We would pretend that we were only hate-reading them, but we would devour them like the pieces of pop-culture cotton candy that they were. Case in point:

While writing a traditional site listicle of "20 Things I Did In College That I Will Never Do Again" --Little known fact: this was originally David Foster Wallace's title for Infinite Jest-- Thought Catalog's Ryan O'Connell lets loose this little nugget:

11. Believe that my senior thesis is a big deal. I wrote a novella about the Chateau Marmont????!!!!

Whoa, what? Back that train up. Someone from Thought Catalog has a novella lying around about the Chateau Marmont and it has somehow never been published? This is an outrage. Less Than Zero was made off of one of Bret Easton Ellis' college essays he wrote on the back of a bar napkin while having a threesome...or so legend goes.

The Chateau Diaries would definitely sell, and sell big. Look, Mr. O'Connell. Why don't you send us your senior thesis and we'll get our friends over at Penguin to take a look at it. Deal? Or you can even make one up! Just write in your own fan fiction about the Chateau Marmont and we promise to at least consider publishing it. It's a win-win, naturally.

Mr. Silverberg was sitting by the pool yesterday afternoon at Hollywood’s legendary Chateau Marmont, preparing for the first night of this year’s Book Expo America, when his partner, the author and former New York Times columnist Bob Morris, cautiously got his attention.

“You will never believe who’s here,” Mr. Morris said.

Mr. Silverberg needed little prompting. Ms. Albert was with a couple of guys, he said later—sleazy-looking, kinda agenty, unclear what the lot of them were talking about. Maybe she was in town shopping a book.

Mr. Silverberg’s friends—Weinstein Books publisher Judy Hottensen and Fresh Air producer Amy Salit—couldn’t believe it when he told them the story last night over drinks in the Marmont garden. “Fraud does not age well,” Mr. Silverberg told them, noting that if he had said anything to Ms. Albert, it would have been something like that.

But Mr. Silverberg did not approach Ms. Albert for a chat. And he wasn’t going to, until shortly after midnight, he received a phone call from Ms. Salit, who had retired minutes earlier to her hotel.

“Laura Albert is here,” Mr. Silverberg told the table after hanging up. “She’s in the lobby.”

This time Mr. Silverberg got excited at the prospect of confrontation. For a second he thought about inviting her to join the table for a drink. But after a bit of giggly, intense chatter—what is she doing at BEA? Is she looking for a book deal?—he paid the bill and coolly led his party inside. “I wish I had my sunglasses,” he said, putting on his normal glasses as though they might do just as well. “I want to see Miss Thing,” he said.

But alas, it was clear as soon as Mr. Silverberg walked into the lobby that Ms. Albert had already disappeared. He looked around a few times and finally decided to call it a night. “She’s not here,” he said.

And with that, he and Mr. Morris went to their room. Big day tomorrow, was the feeling—for the best, perhaps, that this thing had not come to pass.

“I’m going to get serious shit from my girlfriend,” Mr. Ledger can apparently be heard saying to some friends in the video, referring to actress Michelle Williams . “We just had a baby three months ago.”

Aside from featuring the recently deceased actor confessing to habitually smoking pot for much of his life, a male partygoer is shown snorting what reportedly looks like drugs off a table. Entertainment Tonight aired teasers of the video on last night’s episode, claiming at the time that they would air the entire clip on tonight’s broadcast. But then the celeb-obsessed show backed off, locking up the tape which cost them a reported $200,000 to secure.

When the late Keith Moon wasn't jokingly parading around in Hitler regalia, he could probably be found trashing one of the many hotels The Who stayed at. This weekend, The Times "Travel" section takes a look at the hard-living Moon--who "once nailed his room furniture to the ceiling"--along with members of Led Zeppelin, The Faces and the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

So what are younger rock bands up to these days? Well, they're not exactly riding motorcycles through the Chateau Marmont.

And touring with the Rolling Stones (of all bands) must have led to some wild nights. Or not.

And for Southland, a rock band from L.A., partying comes with life on the road. But so does trying to get a bargain.

Things they do look awful cold.

- Michael Calderone

Now, you'd think the publisher-bookseller relationship would be pretty cut-and-dried. The people who sell the product couldn't do their jobs without the people who make the product, and vice versa, right? Right, except for one thing: We're talking about publishing-an industry not exactly known for its inclusivity. And while publishers need booksellers (even the independents, who are responsible for, at best, an estimated 20 or so percent of total book sales), 51 weeks of the year they'd sooner lunch and sup and party with each other-and, of course, complain that the business has become so repetitive, so insular and that you see the same 20 people everywhere you go-than with these mere merchants.

But once a year, from Thursday through Sunday in late May, either in Chicago, L.A. or New York, publishers suck up to booksellers by seeming to include them in the glamorous, glitzy world of big-time publishing. They invite them to splashy cocktail parties with their star authors, schedule intimate private dinners and join them for nightcaps at tony hotels.

And when the convention is held in Los Angeles, as it was last week for the first time since 1999, the uses of celebrity are endless. After a day spent negotiating the proverbially impossible L.A. traffic-most out-of-towners take cabs, which can cost up to $40 each way for those clueless enough to want to stay on the West Side-booksellers and the occasional journalist are invited to unwind with the likes of Martin Mull and Mike Nichols as they toast Steve Martin for his forthcoming The Pleasure of My Compan y at the ultra-glam Hotel Bel-Air. Here's where the smart celeb-sighters can spot Tracey Ullman mingling among book folk on the terrace of the Chateau Marmont. Here's where you can visit famous studio honcho Frank Biondi's Brentwood estate (at a Grove Atlantic party for George Crile's Charlie Wilson's War ), which just happens to be down the road apiece on Rockingham Avenue from O.J. Simpson's, or belly up to the bar next to HarperCollins' Jane Friedman, Julie Andrews and former porn star Traci Lords at Fox Studios. On the theory that you can never have too many boldface names, publishers routinely trot out the best show ponies in their stables, even if works by these authors won't be appearing on the fall list. That's why Glen David Gold, author of the novel Carter Beats the Devil , shows up at Hyperion's bash for Steve Martin (Martin Amis, who does have a novel, Yellow Dog , coming from Hyperion sister-distributor Miramax, was also there; ditto former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright), and why now 19-year-old Nick McDonell-who said he's taking some time off from Harvard to finish his second novel-held court at Grove Atlantic's Chateau Marmont bashes.

But lest you, or the booksellers, think that publishing has gone totally Hollywood, consider this: There are also daytime meetings at the Convention Center, at which publishers and booksellers sit together pitching and ordering books. What draws booksellers there, when they can just as easily place their orders with the publishers' reps who visit and/or call them for months pre-publication? Why, star quality, of course! Here's where a mom-and-pop shopkeeper from Dubuque might gain an audience with Knopf's Sonny Mehta, or at least spot him prowling the halls looking for a place to smoke. Here's where an enterprising lit-lover might lay eyes on Grove's Morgan Entrekin-whom, I swear to God, I saw at his stand one day before noon! And if the celebrity publishers and the in-booth signings by the likes of Anthony Bourdain, Faye Kellerman, Toni Morrison, Jonathan Lethem and Augusten Burroughs (among many, many others) don't draw them in, the free stuff does: It's not unusual to see a bookseller at 9:45 a.m. haul three tote bags full of galleys, buttons, T-shirts and other giveaways to his car, deposit them in the trunk and then rush back inside to gather up more.

Make no mistake: B.E.A. is about selling, pure and simple, and in this very bad time in the book business, publishers can be excused for trying every gimmick in the, well, book. Even for an industry built on poor-mouthing-"We've been here before," the Nobel Prize–winning author Toni Morrison intoned at a speech early one morning, and then described the sorry state of publishing when she released her first novel, The Bluest Eye , in 1970-this year seems particularly bad. B.E.A. organizers will say traffic is "strong … not as strong as last year in New York, but still good," but publishers suggest otherwise; one confided, sotto voce, that sales of his titles were off by a double-digit percentage from the first six months of last year-which, you might remember, was the season just after Sept. 11. Wandering the crowded halls of B.E.A. is like negotiating the floors of Barneys in the weeks before Christmas: The place is packed, all right, but you can't help wondering how many of the tourists are buying and how many are "just looking."

So, while talk among the publishing folk is whether Bertelsmann is about to announce that they are indeed buying the AOL Time Warner book division, booksellers are trying to figure out which of the hundreds of titles they're hearing about will become next season's The Lovely Bones . At a packed panel presentation on Thursday afternoon, six prominent editors-Knopf's Mr. Mehta, Simon & Schuster's Alice Mayhew, Dial's Susan Kamil, Riverhead's Julie Grau, Norton's Starling Lawrence and HarperCollins' Claire Wachtel made their pitches and predictions, which ranged from Walter Isaacson's Benjamin Franklin (duh!) to The Kite Runner , an Afghan memoir that already had some pre-publication buzz, to Tim Gautreaux's The Clearing , a Knopf novel pitched by a visibly uncomfortable and admittedly unprepared Mr. Mehta. The point was to get booksellers excited enough to rush over to the booths and place mammoth orders and then talk the books up to their customers.

While the buzz-panel moderator, Publishers Weekly 's Nora Rawlinson, pointed out that all the books mentioned on last year's buzz panel went on to great success, a better judge of future sales might be the packed-to-overflowing bookseller attendance at such events as a Mitch Albom reading and signing for his forthcoming debut novel, The Five People You Meet in Heaven , a probable blockbuster for which Hyperion has taken the highly unusual step of creating hardbound bookseller reading copies, pre-signed by the Tuesdays with Morrie author. Also popular was a performance given by Ellen DeGeneres, who has a new book coming from Simon & Schuster. And execs at Broadway and Dutton must have gone to sleep smiling on Saturday when authors and co-panelists Al Franken and Bill O'Reilly nearly came to blows (unscripted, observers insist) over their wildly divergent political views. On Sunday morning, though many publishing types were already at the airport, booksellers were wowed by Madeleine Albright's presentation of Madame Secretary , coming from Miramax, and Michael Moore, predictably, woke up the crowd by asking them to vote on whether he should keep calling his forthcoming book Dude, Where's My Country? (They thought he should, apparently.)

At B.E.A., there's simply no such thing as too much flattery. At Saturday's breakfast, Ms. Morrison, who was once an editor at Random House, spent a full 10 minutes of her allotted 15 buttering up the booksellers and only spent the last third of her speech actually reading from her new novel, Love . She told them she was there because of them, and she praised them lavishly for the "hard work" they do getting the books "out of the shops" and building up authors. Thus totally massaged, the audience erupted into passionate applause when she then opined that her novel was, "as you can see"-stop for dramatic sip of water-" perfect ." But perfection, she went on, is not enough. Without smart bookselling, even brilliant books die.

Who says publishing events are drab and undramatic? This stuff was pure theater.

Whether it will work, however, is another question, and there was the predictable grumbling in the halls about the good old days when B.E.A. was simply a nonprofit event sponsored by the American Booksellers Association, instead of the for-profit media event run by Reed Elsevier. There was also speculation about whether, in these poor economic times, it's even worth a publisher's while to spend the tens of thousands of dollars it costs to get the players and sets out here for the show. But judging from the comments I overheard at the Hotel Bel-Air while waiting in a (long) line for a cab back from the Steve Martin bash, booksellers were buying the hype, if not the books. Who doesn't want to go back to Dubuque with tales of spending Saturdays with Mitch or shaking a movie star's hand?

But all this buttering up has its price, of course, and at moments you could see publishing types' patience wearing thin. At the Knopf dinner on Friday, for example, the soon-to-be-crowd-pleasing Ms. Morrison sat with a select few at a table far away from the hoi polloi. And by early morning, even the most well-meaning executives had had their fill of the booksellers. I was lingering on the Chateau Marmont patio chatting with friends when the manager of one of the good independents approached me. Praising an article he'd read in this very paper-and having noticed that my own book was due to be published this fall-he began chatting me up. Would I like to come to his store and talk about my work? I said of course, ordered another drink and tried to be charming.

A few minutes later, a New York exec came up to me. "You were awfully friendly to that creepy bookseller," she said, with some surprise and not a little disapproval.

Silly me. I thought being nice to booksellers was what B.E.A. was all about.