New York Times discovers book parties; next week, what bears do in the woods

"Once upon a time, it was a raucous open-bar affair, paid for by a publisher. These days, with print under siege, it's often up to friends and family to foot the bill." So if you don't have an open bar and raucity, with a price tag, your book party doesn't count. That's nice. I doubt any of the ones I went to in the past year "count" under those metrics, but they were all very nice anyway. It's probably not the best metric for the health of the publishing industry, in any case.