There appears to be a slump in conservative political books. “The conservative market is not unified, there are many fractures,” says the president of Regnery Publishing. “The ongoing war in Iraq and his positions on immigration and education has made it harder to get anyone to write books that rally behind [Mr. Bush].”

Also from the BookExpo, Hillel Italie reports, “New releases topped 290,000 in 2006, according to statisticians R.R. Bowker, which, thanks to revised methodology, added a bountiful 100,000 titles to its previous estimates. . . .

BookExpo reminds you of how the new becomes old, like watching Pete Hamill promote his new book, The Gift, while a few aisles away, at the “Remainders” section of the convention, a previous Hamill book, Downtown, was being sold for $3.”