RICHARD KOENIGSBERG--THE RELAUNCH
Please scroll down the page for photos of our early book exhibits

With the assistance of a consultant or two, I'm in the process of a "Relaunch." I will not be relaunching LIBRARY OF SOCIAL SCIENCE BOOK EXHIBITS--since scholarly and professional book exhibits are now defunct.. The relaunch will be of Richard Koenigsberg: scholar, thinker, lecturer and author. The products I create will be videos, podcasts, books, lectures, interviews, etc., bringing me into the public domain, joining Jordan Peterson, Zizek, Howard Bloom, etc.

However, before I "relaunch" it's necessary to review and study "where I've been." Where I've been at. The thirty-year-plus history of the company. The future--as we historians know--grows out of the past.

The book exhibit company began as a side-dish when I was invited to speak at a meeting of the International Society of Political Society. My wife, Mei Ha Chan-Koenigsberg, came with me and we set up two tables with about thirty book.

The ISPP conference organizer, Denis Snook, treated me with great respect and suggested that I might consider creating book exhibits for other scholarly and professional conferences. Book exhibits, he said, should be a “service to an organization’s members, who want to know about the latest and most significant developments.” Books displayed at a meeting would provide attendees with a “comprehensive picture of the state of the art in the field.”

This was the idea upon which Library of Social Science Book Exhibits was born. As Hitler said to his childhood friend, August Kubicek, "That is where it all began."

Mei Ha and I organized book exhibits again for the International Society of Political Psychology meetings in 1990, 1992, 1993 and 1994--and gradually developed book exhibits for conferences in other disciplines.

I began to earn a modest living by creating book exhibits each year. Even so, it wasn’t clear that I was a businessman. It seemed that I was creating book exhibits to support my mission as a scholar. Book exhibits provided the finances that allowed me to travel to meetings and give presentations.

Eventually, as conference organizers got to know me (as I rapped with them about the book exhibits I was going to create, discussing logistics, etc), they got to know me as a thinker or scholar.  I began to be invited to give Keynote Presentations.

Analyzing the data, 1990-2000, it turns out we organized book exhibits for over 100 conferences--and that I gave 51 presentations during this period. At nearly every one of the conferences at which I presented a paper, I also organized and managed a book exhibit. I was killing two birds with one stone (or two stones with one bird, as Mei Ha put it--she's a tough bird).

In any case, it's clear that--having quit my job as a College Professor--if I hadn’t developed Library of Social Science as a book exhibit business--I wouldn't have had a context or framework to develop as a scholar.

Since most attendees stop by at book exhibits once or twice at a conference, it's not an exaggeration to say that I met most of the significant scholars in each academic discipline. I rapped with them at the book exhibit tables and many of them purchased my books.

I can't recall the names of all of the people I met and who purchased  my books, but among the people that stand out in my mind are: Otto Kernberg, Joyce McDougal, James Grotstein (great guy) and Janine Chasseguet-Smirgel (wonderful woman) in psychoanalysis. Omer Bartov, Daniel Goldhagen, Goldhagen's father--and many others--at Holocaust Conferences. Naomi Quinn, Emily Martin, Eric Wolf, Alex Hinton--and many others--at Anthropology conferences. 

The book exhibit business gave me the opportunity to occupy a space of freedom within the academic world. I was part of this world, but also not a part of it. 

Please scroll down the page for photos of our early book exhibits.
Winter Meeting of the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, Santa Barbara, California, December 9, 1994. In the years from 1990-2000, Mei Ha Chan and I worked as a team at nearly every one of the approximately 150 book exhibits we organized. Of the many cities we saw in the course of our travels, Santa Barbara was one of the most beautiful, although—as usual—we spent nearly all our time with the books.
64th Annual Meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, Baltimore, March 17, 1994. I’m holding the three books that I authored and published, which I sold along with books by the publishers represented by LSS. This was one of those rare occasions when we “rented a booth.” I presented a paper, “Nazism as an Immunological Fantasy.”
American Historical Society, Pacific Coast Branch, San Diego, CA; August 8, 1998. By this time, our book exhibit template had begun to jell: ten tables at a central location, with coffee breaks. In the photo, I’m checking out the set-up—just before attendees begin to arrive.
The first book exhibit that Mei Ha did on her own was at a meeting of the Society for Cross Cultural Research in St. Petersburg, Florida, February 18-22, 1998. In the photo above, I’m at the 77th Annual Meeting of the Central States Anthropological Society, Indiana University, Bloomington, April 20-23, 2000. After this meeting, my career as an onsite book exhibit manager began to wind down.