Everybody groused about the heat in the Javits Center at BookExpo America Friday and Saturday, but HarperCollins senior editor Doug Grad was in a unique position to get some answers—his dad’s a retired consulting engineeer who led the team that designed the HVAC (heating, ventilation, air conditioning) system in the Javits roughly a quarter-century ago. This is what Ian Grad had to say, as forwarded to me by email yesterday: “We designed the Javits Center to keep big crowds cool on really hot and humid days. The cooling capacity is there,” he wrote (8,300 tons of it, in fact, which we figure is a lot). Grad père also pointed out that building codes, not to mention engineering standards, would require a system that could handle the dog days of August, let alone last weekend’s heat. So why didn’t it? “Whether the building engineers were trying to conserve energy, or whether the guys don’t know how to run the system, I don’t know,” he told his son. “I haven’t been involved with Javits for over twenty years. But it should have been cool inside.”