Dorks and Nerds: Is There A Quorum?

As I continue trying to understand the positioning of the "vacation product" I'm creating -- and futilely browse the internet looking for references and listings -- I am finding practically nothing. Really -- it's quite stunning how little evidence there is, aside from the Bookstore-Tourism stuff that has spun off of Larry Portzline's efforts -- the various indie bookstore association trips -- how little evidence there is that anyone is traveling out of his or her way to a bookstore. Funniest is using the various Travel Search Engines. Sites like Yahoo!Travel can come up with matches for the word "bookstore" but there's certainly no sign of anybody's trips centering on such a thing. Fascinating. I think. Also scary. I mean, I'm the kind of guy who pulls the Yellow Pages out of the little bedside table in any hotel in any unfamiliar city and flips to "Bookstores" pretty much before doing anything else. Am I truly the only person who thinks that a town's bookstores are about the most significant thing there? (Did you say yes? Liar!)

I did come across this comment, written in response to one of Jessica Stockton's posts about a recent Greenwich Village Bookstore Tour that had visited her store, McNally Robinson.

"Gursky said...
Why is it that the idea of the bookstore tour sounded so exciting, but then actually seeing it happen sort of embarrassed me? Is embarrassment so easily multiplied that I can handle my own small doses of enthusiasm, but to have others' filling the air round me like so much bad perfume just makes it harder to breathe? Genre get-togethers have the same effect on me. Yes, let us be dorks and quote scripture in our dyads and trios, but please don't subject me to a room (or bus) of my terrifyingly nerdy doppelgangers. Maybe it's all just down to my fear of being "that guy". If there are few enough of us, I can pick out enough detail to convince myself that indeed, I am not this guy standing right here. But a whole indistinct mass of Dork is another thing entirely. Perhaps if I really weren't that guy it wouldn't be so frightening."

(http://writtennerd.blogspot.com/2006/12/link-mad-monday-plus-book-reviews.html)

Now -- I ask you -- doesn't this sound like EXACTLY the kind of wonderfully funny self-deprecating person it would indeed be great to spend the day just hobnobbing around town going to bookstores with?

Come on. There have got to be enough of us to make a company like this work. Yahoo!Travel be damned. We do exist. (I sure hope so anyhow.)