“A strange gift and a touching speech,” deadpanned Daniel Handler. “This feels like my bar mitzvah.” Instead, it was the party for The End, the thirteenth and final volume in Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events, a swank affair spread out over several floors of a West Village townhouse. (I was informed several times during the course of the evening that the building was the set for the first Real World, to which I always replied, “Yes, and remember when that cat got stuck in the wall of a building and brought the city to a standstill? That was next door!”) Handler described how, several years ago when he was still an obscure writer, he used to hang out at other book parties. “I was busy drinking free wine and complaining that nobody would publish me, which was apparently not the way to go,” he quipped. But it was at those parties that he became friendly with HarperCollins children’s editor Susan Rich, hatching “nefarious plans in the far corners of the room” as he put it. In her own remarks, Rich recalled how the first Lemony Snicket book party, back in ’99, had been held in her own apartment with a total budget of $200. “It’s hard to believe what seven years of bad luck has brought,” she smiled.
The rooms of the Hudson Street townhouse were decorated with several of illusrator Brett Halquist’s portraits of characters like Count Olaf, while Susan Rich proffered a “Lemony Snicket,” a concoction of Absolut and lemonade. Meanwhile, Kirkus children’s book review editor Karen Breen engaged in conversation with her counterpart at Amazon.com, Karin Snelson. For more photos, see Ron Hogan’s photostream.