Madrid Book Fair

Things to remember for next year:
Better shoes. You will be standing for six and a half hours each day, eight and a half hours at weekends, and the comfortable old sneakers in which you start the day will be arch-tormenting by the end. Walking boots?
More bookmarks / catalogues. We printed 6,000 bookmarks and 2,000 catalogues, and ran out of both. Next year 5,000 catalogues and, what, 10,000 bookmarks?
Water. At least two litres each morning and afternoon.
Leave the house earlier. I spent too much money on taxis, and even then turned up about five minutes late most of the time.
Prepare a spiel, or a series of spiels. I said the same thing about each book thousands and thousands of times. ('Yes, they are comic stories by Dostoevsky; as it's Dostoevsky, it's fairly dark humour.' 'It's a marvellous novel about the childhood of a young girl in the last years of the nineteenth century.' 'Communists on Mars!') It's quicker and more efficient if you have a sales pitch worked out and don't have to spend a day or so working on it.
Work out how to say 'Literatura rusa' without stumbling or turning the 'r' of 'rusa' into a 'w'.
Be resigned to idiots and timewasters. The women who say 'Oh no, I don't read Russian literature.' (I'm sure you've read widely enough to be able to make such statements of faith, madam.) The man who tells you about a marvellous Russian female writer who publishes a self-help / diet book every three months. (I don't care who you're sleeping with, sir, it still isn't really our line.) The people who want to sell you books. The people who want second-hand books. The people who think that, just because you publish Russian literature, you publish all Russian literature, and who are annoyed when you don't have a particular book. The people who want to reminisce about a lovely time they spent in the Soviet Union as children. The people who want to speak to you in Russian. For an hour.
A float of 200 euros (mostly in units of 10, 5, 1, 0.5, 0.1) is probably enough to be going on with. Next year, of course, it will be a float of 35,000 pesetas, but that's a problem we'll have to work with when it comes.