Michael Smerconish, on his CNN Sunday program, just had a story about homeowners wanting fewer white picket fences and more taller, privacy fences (I tuned in part-way through, and so missed the introduction of his guest who wrote the article that caught his attention and caused him to tell the story). He mentioned that fences break up the landscape, separate us from our neighbors, and so forth. That resonated with me.

I get a similar feeling in dealers’ rooms at the conventions I attend. Way back when, dealers would have their wares on tables, and customers would look at those wares, but could glance up to see across the room, see all the people and tables. And we dealers could see each other, look around to see if there were crowds of customers somewhere in the room even if they weren’t at our tables, subconsciously feel we were all in it together. But over the last bunch of years, table displays have gotten taller and more complex, with huge banners back-stopping the table. Lines of tables all together in a room have turned into series of caves. The aisles between the tables have turned into deep chasms, with nothing visible except the few at arm’s length and the ceiling above. We’ve lost sight of all the other dealers except the one directly across the aisle, and I feel so closed in, almost claustrophobic.

During the story, Smerconish quoted the phrase “good fences make good neighbors,” which we’ve all heard. But do we ever consider the rest of the poem (“Mending Wall” by Robert Frost) in which the phrase appears? Indeed, the speaker of “good fences make good neighbors” never explains what he means or why. But the narrator, talking with him, goes on to ponder

Why do they make good neighbours? Isn’t it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out.…

Are fences—in general—a response to our increasingly electronically connected world? Is it that we let everyone into our lives on our screens, so we feel a greater need to keep them out of our physical spaces? I can sort of accept that reasoning. But in the dealers’ rooms, I just find it uncomfortable. I’ve found that, when I’m setting up my table in the middle of a row, I won’t put up my large banners behind me until the vendor backing my table has set up and erected whatever large display will be there, facing the other aisle, walling me out. And in the rare event that my back-to-back neighbor does not have a sight-line cutting display, I won’t put up the banners. It’s my little protest against the walling off, the sectioning off, of the dealers’ room.

Perhaps, being taller than average, I have a different view of such things. On a crowded subway car, my face isn’t pressed into my neighbor’s back; I can see above all the heads in the car, to the few other tall people. Perhaps it’s that usual long view that makes the walling-in especially unpleasant to me.

And I know, for many dealers, it’s been like an arms race. The first to distribute free colorful bookmarks grabbed a lot of notice from potential readers browsing the freebie table. But now there are dozens of those bookmarks, and they can no longer be seen individually (consider trees in a forest). Similarly, the first to have a huge banner behind the table attracted attention from across the room. But now that everyone has one, the banner no longer attracts attention, but only serves as a wall, a backdrop. I try to make my display as low as possible—I’ve stopped using the racks that stand two feet tall on my table—so that I can see my customers and they can see me. (The attached picture is, for example, the Fantastic Books table in the dealers’ room at Arisia 2015.)

I’ve occasionally thought that if I were running a dealers’ room, I would ask vendors the heights of their displays, and then put all the tall displays together in one corner of the room—or at least in the back—and let those with short displays be in the front of the room, so that it would feel more open, larger, for customers walking in to be able to see everything, and for vendors to be able to see them.

My house doesn’t have a front yard, so no fence is necessary. And even though I’m a city dweller, I still like, enjoy, need those open spaces, those long views, that make me feel connected, make me feel a small part of it all, rather than a large resident of a tiny cell. How about you? Are you busily building fences and walls to keep me out?

Tips gratefully accepted: https://ko-fi.com/ianrandalstrock