I'm choking back bitter, salty tears at the prospect of not doing Book Expo this year, despite many kind offers of couches scattered across the Five Boroughs (well, across Queens) where I can crash.
My normal hookup for a badge, Chaosium, won't be going, and none of my other expedients have borne fruit.
While the cost of a badge is pretty reasonable considering all you get for it, between badge, airfare, and the ancillary costs of meals and trippy Tribeca movies and drinks and such, the total cost of all those beautiful free books tips the scales in this time of Austerity.
I shall have to console myself with Chicago in late May, live vicariously through
rdansky, freeport_pirate and lemuriapress, and buy Owen Davies' Grimoires: A History of Magic Books with my Amazon Associates money rather than score it from the kindly folks at OUP direct.But it shan't be the same, somehow.