So it turns out that authors have “book tours” (yeah, it sounds crazy, doesn’t it?). You would think that everything they had to say was already in the book, but they do this to sell more books. They go around to various cities and they talk about their book and sometimes participate in panel discussions with other authors.

An integral part of this is the book signing. Now suppose you read a book that was very good and you really appreciate the ideas of this person and their ability to express them in such a way that they have. What benefit do you possibly see in having it signed by the author? First of all, their name is already on the book (the cover, in fact), so it’s redundant. So what do you benefit from knowing that this person wrote their name on this paper? What difference does it make?

It’s stupid celebrity worship every day of the week. I can sort of understand more how people ask sportsmen for autographs, because when you meet an athlete then you don’t really have anything “of theirs” to keep. So even an autograph (which again is meaningless, who cares about the calligraphic skills of a sportsman? that’s not what you admire them for) is something. With an author this is turned on its head, because the item being signed is the very work that you appreciate, so you already _have_ their best output in your hand.