As September hovers perilously near, we are gearing up for a number of upcoming shows.

First up is the Small Press Expo, the annual indie comic festival in Bethesda, Maryland. This year we will have not one, but two tables: one devoted to Idiots’Books and another to Bobbledy. That’s Saturday and Sunday, September 14 and 15. If you like books, comics, illustration, or general weirdness, it’s well worth a visit.

The following weekend, as guests at the Chestertown Book Festival, we will be doing a Bobbledy Books reading/talk/presentation/signing event at Chestertown’s Book Plate book store at 11:00am on Saturday. We will be reading a few Bobbledy titles, talking about how we make books together, and kissing any babies that happen to wander in.

The weekend after that, we will be in Baltimore for our first appearance at the Baltimore Book Festival, which is, apparently, the Mid-Atlantic’s premiere book event.

Here’s how they describe it on the website:

The Baltimore Book Festival features hundreds of appearances by local, celebrity and nationally known authors, book signings, more than 100 exhibitors and booksellers, nonstop readings on multiple stages, cooking demos by top chefs, poetry readings, workshops, panel discussions, walking tours, storytellers and hands-on projects for kids, live music, and a delicious variety of food, beer and wine.

We will have a booth devoted to Idiots’Books and Bobbledy fare. We would very much like it if you would come by and say hello.

Anyway, in preparation for all the selling we hope to be doing, there was the matter of making. We periodically run out of books, and though we are glad to have sold them, we often grumble at the prospects of replacing then. One might reasonably assume that we have a well-organized inventory that helps us keep track of it all. One would be wrong. At any given time, we have no idea which books are available and which are not.

And so, from time to time, I have to take all the books out of the cabinet and count them.

It’s a wearying affair, but at the end of the exercise, I have a list of books for Robbi to print, which she is doing at this moment. Which is why it’s so loud in here just now.

The verdict: there are more than 500 books to be made in the next few weeks. My sleeves are rolled up. My fingers are bracing for the paper cuts.