A signing table is a strange piece of furniture. For an hour it is the only fixed point in a very large room, and everyone who approaches it has already decided, before they reach you, exactly what they want the book to have meant to them. My job is mostly to listen and to spell names correctly, which I get wrong more often than I would like to admit.
Someone brought a photocopy of a real declassified page about MESM, underlined in three colors, and wanted to know if I had seen it. I had - it is one of the sources behind the Shkabara thread - and for a few minutes the fair noise fell away and we just talked about an engineer neither of us had ever met and both, clearly, missed.
I sign under the good light of a convention hall that photographs badly and feels wonderful to sit in, three books deep into a stack that keeps not running out. I will take the noise over the quiet of the desk any day this particular week allows me to.
Related: Ternary Dreams