Sprawled on the lawn, curled up on the sofa, sitting on the steps in the piazza — they’re communing with a great author, or a funny author, or an author who’s telling them how to cook or knit or fix something in their life that’s broken. Some of them are reading poetry.  Some of them are reading it on e-book devices.

There are millions of them, all scattered around.  One book to a person, one person to a book.

Saturday, more than 120,000 of them are projected to be on one lawn, in one city, at one time: on the National Mall at the Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington, D.C.  It’ll happen from 10 a.m. to 5:30 p.m., rain or shine — free of charge.

YES.

More than 70 major authors will speak about their writing before happy crowds in pavilions dedicated to Fiction & Fantasy, History & Biography, Mysteries & Thrillers, Children, Teens & Children, and Poetry & Prose. The authors will also sign books for their fans.

Families can enjoy the literacy-promotion activities of the state and territorial Centers for the Book in the Pavilion of the States; kids can enjoy activities and presentations planned just for them in the “Let’s Read America” pavilions. The “Digital Bookmobile” will be there.  The Library of Congress will showcase its Library of Congress Experience and social-networking activities, including this blog , its Flickr page and its Facebook page. The whole thing will be on Twitter (@librarycongress, hashtag #nbf).  Also, our website for the book festival is a great place to plan for this feast, complete with fresh podcasts from more than a dozen of this year’s authors. There’s a Young Readers’ Toolkit there, too. And the day of the book festival, webcasts of many of the author presentations will be available on the festival website.

Here’s a tip — this “Lollapalooza” of the book world is going to open with a flourish. A team of young people’s authors, fronted by the irrepressible National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Jon Scieszka, will launch the new read.gov website that promotes reading and literacy for all ages as the festival opens at 10 a.m., in the Children’s pavilion.  You won’t have to be a kid to get a kick out of this one: The new site will premiere a serial story, with the first (completely zany) chapter to be read by Scieszka from the stage.  It’s titled “The Exquisite Corpse Adventure,” and to find out what happens next — this story will unfold every two weeks for a year — you’ll have to go to read.gov.

But to find out what the coolest event is in Washington D.C. is on September 26, 2009, you’ll have to go to the National Mall between 7th and 14th streets.  Wear comfortable shoes — and prepare to be swept away!

Such as?

Such as an ad for a patent medicine that figured in an 1898 murder case; a first edition in Russian of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s “The Possessed;” small Brazilian books of populist poetry in Portuguese commemorating everything from the regional Robin Hood (Pernoite de Lampiao) to the felling of the World Trade Center towers; and the small-but-astonishing notebooks of artist and designer James Miho (who dropped in to see the display).

Today was results day for the fifth class of Library of Congress Junior Fellows, who showed off fascinating materials turned up in their work researching, inventorying, and cataloging these collections to make them easier to use. The internships are made possible by the generosity of the late Mrs. Jefferson Patterson and the Library’s James Madison Council.

Leslie Tabor, a second-year master’s candidate in Library Information Science at Syracuse University who worked with materials found in the Copyright Office, described how Kutnow’s Effervescent Powder figured in a murder case. A killer laced the nostrum with poison; today’s display featured a newspaper ad for the medicine–that offered free samples!

Jacob Roberts, who’ll be a junior majoring in History at Wesleyan University in the fall, used the Library’s “Chronicling America” collection of U.S. newspapers to research U.S. angles on the Dreyfus Affair, an infamous French anti-Semitism case that drew the famous phrase “J’Accuse!” from writer and journalist Emile Zola.

Shireen Al-Zahawi of Salt Lake City, who graduated last year with a Fine Arts degree from the University of Utah, researched the life of Library of Congress Japanese specialist Shiho Sakanishi, who died in 1976. The Japanese-born Sakanishi, a translator and scholar, attended college in the U.S., taught for a time, then became a specialist in the Library’s Japanese-language collections from 1930-1941. With the declaration of war against Japan in World War II, however, she was first interned and later deported to the nation of her birth. There, Dr. Sakanishi was honored for her scholarship. She returned to the U.S. in 1963 to give a convocation address at her alma mater, the University of Michigan.

Lest you think all these newly-exposed nuggets are still yellow with age, consider this: that collection of Brazilian folk poetry (”literatura de cordel”) continues to grow. Fellow Amy Jankowski, a master’s candidate in Library Science at the University of Indiana at Bloomington, noted that one of the freshest items in it is an ode to pop singer Michael Jackson … written, and placed in the collections, since his death.

But that’s not all!

Today the Library announced that authors James Patterson, George Pelecanos, Nikki Grimes, Marilynne Robinson, Sharon Creech, Daniel Silva and W. Ralph Eubanks have signed on for the ninth annual festival, to be held on the National Mall from 10 a.m.-5:30 p.m. As always, the event is free and open to the public.

In addition to this amazing lineup of more than 70 authors — the full list is available here–this year’s book festival will feature many social-networking features, including updates through Twitter and Facebook. To receive up-to-the-minute information for this year’s event, such as author activities, day-of-event details and much more, follow the library on Twitter (@librarycongress, hashtag #nbf) or become a fan of the Library on Facebook (www.facebook.com/libraryofcongress). There will be new podcasts of interviews with festival authors available free of charge on the Library’s website (www.loc.gov) and on iTunes U (link here, opens in iTunes).

Want your own copy of the National Book Festival Poster, by author/illustrator Charles Santore? It’s here. For more information about this year’s National Book Festival, click here.

I’ve had the pleasure of meeting Kay a few times and talking with her several more times, and I think the article does a wonderful job of capturing her personality, her take on the role of Poet Laureate, and what she believes is the essence of poetry. (I wrote about Kay at length here.)

By the way, if you hadn’t already seen, we were thrilled that Kay recently agreed to stay on as Poet Laureate for a second term. You’ll have the opportunity to see her firsthand at the National Book Festival on Sept. 26. (We will soon be announcing a much broader—and stellar—list of authors for this year’s NBF.)

Details about the National Recording Registry can be found here

This colossal event, heading into its ninth year, lets book-lovers hear and meet their favorite authors, gives children a chance to meet favorite characters and engage in fun activities, and offers a simply delightful fall day to the thousands upon thousands of folks who attend.
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You can read details of the book festival announcement here and see webcasts from last year’s National Book Festival here and on the Library’s site on YouTube.

Save that date!

2009 marks the 14th year the program, co-founded by former U. S. Poet Laureate Robert Hass and writer Pamela Michael and affiliated with the Library’s Center for the Book, has reached out to young people in the United States and Canada and indeed, around the world. The program urges them to express their relationship with or concerns about the natural world in the form of poetry or visual art. Hass said there were 20,000 entries this year.

Here’s an excerpt from the grand prize-winning poem in Category II (grades 3-6), “It’s a Letter” by 9-year-old Yalonda Lockett of Lancaster, Pennsylvania:

In the dark blue sea

I saw a letter, it was

very small and this

is what it said:

I miss you in the dark blue sea.

Finalist Ruben Moreno, 10, of Silver Spring, Maryland wrote about the pond behind his home:

… a lover of rain and fresh melting snow.

She fears the sun — a slow hot demise,

And thirsts for water — a random revival.

A sliver of calm tucked

Into new urban sprawl …

To read the poems and see the artwork of these talented young students, ranging in age from 5 to 19, see the River of Words website.

Then go outside!

If so, you might want to tune into the Charlie Rose Show tonight for “A Conversation with Kay Ryan, U.S. Poet Laureate, and Dr. James Billington, Librarian of Congress.”  (I made a brief mention of the taping a couple of weeks ago.)

The show can be seen on your local PBS station.  Times vary; check your local listings.

I hope you enjoy it as much as I did — but even more, I hope inspires many more Americans into a love of poetry.

But what wasn’t expected was that a visitor would be inspired to set his inspiration down in verse.

A man named Bob Bein recently went on such a tour led by Malcolm and was so moved that he wrote the poem “The Library of Congress” in July 2008. We reproduce it here with Bob’s permission, for which we are grateful:

Oh such grandeur at the temple entrance,
symbolic stone figures flank
majestic marble staircases,
statues with torches blaze the path to wisdom,
skylights brighten layers of understanding.

Truly a temple of knowledge,
human gods of arts and sciences look on
thirsty believers eagerly awaiting
meager droplets of passed down lore.
Even higher are images of human aspirations—
Understanding, to lift a curtain of ignorance,
Encouragement, pushing Man closer to perfection.

This is the inside of a brain:
an enormous domed space,
grand art inside the skull,
study desks ringing
the central station,
axon-like conveyor belts speeding
expertise to anxious disciples.

Classic pneumatic tubes
carry nerve impulse notes
demanding diverse media
following searches of endless
brain cell card catalogs and appeals
to new computer circuitry.

Genuflect, and respect
the sum of stored knowledge,
despite how much more will accrete
we will always feel incomplete:
the notion of infinity
includes infinity plus three.