From Blume to Franzen, how does the Toronto Public Library’s Appel Salon attract its A-list literary talent?

When Judy Blume walked into the Toronto Public Library’s Bram & Bluma Appel Salon on June 29, the 950-person crowd broke into the kind of boisterous applause usually reserved for rock stars and sports heroes. By the end of Blume’s on-stage interview with arts journalist Rachel Giese, more than a dozen overexcited attendees had already lined up to get their books signed. And by the time the author reached the signing table, the line had snaked around the edges of the 6,380-square-foot room. Instagram quickly turned into a running feed of grinning (mostly female) fans posing with their childhood literary icon – #IloveJudyBlume.

Blume also has a big fan in the TPL’s cultural and special events programming manager, Yvonne Hunter, who booked the sold-out appearance for the library’s reading series. “She was an author I read growing up,” Hunter says. “I loved Deenie and all her books, and suddenly was in the position of, ‘Hey, I can book Judy Blume! How cool is that!’”

Since taking over from retired programmer Tina Srebotnjak last year, Hunter – a publishing veteran and former vice-president of publicity and marketing for Penguin Canada – has brought to the position a mix of lit-fan intuition and industry experience. She arrived with a dream list of authors she believed could attract new crowds to the TPL, including Girls creator Lena Dunham, who appeared in front of 1,000 people last fall, filmmaker-artist-author Miranda July, and, coming this October, Carrie Brownstein, the musician and Portlandia star.

“It was this wonderful opportunity to come in and … book every author that I’ve ever dreamt of having,” Hunter says.

Envisioned as a marquee event space within the downtown Toronto Reference Library, the second-floor Appel Salon is bright and airy, thanks to an east-facing terrace. The low stage area is simply furnished to accommodate conversation-style interviews, avoiding snoozy lecture-hall formalities. A back-area bar with cocktail-lounge seating keeps things lively.

From the onset, Hunter’s mission has been to evolve the salon’s brand into what Jamie Broadhurst, Raincoast Books’ vice-president of marketing calls the “92nd Street Y of the north,” referring to the New York City cultural centre and its popular reading series. Both the 92nd Street Y and the New York Public Library’s live events serve as models for the TPL in its ambitious plan to become a go-to North American destination for international authors.

Judging from this fall’s lineup, Hunter and her team are well on their way to positioning Toronto on the touring circuit, with Jonathan Franzen, Kathy Reichs, Ian Rankin, John Irving, and Geraldine Brooks joining Canadian A-listers such as Margaret Atwood, Lawrence Hill, Kate Beaton, and Patrick deWitt. On Sept. 24, Salman Rushdie will discuss his new novel, Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, a partnered event with the Harbourfront International Festival of Authors.

Of course cultural programming is not an exact science. While there are no rules, Hunter must juggle a diverse balance of Canadian and international authors, taking into consideration gender, age, and genre. “Curating this program for me is a bit like curating an editorial list,” she says. Hunter knows, for instance, that crime fiction fills seats, a lesson learned at the first salon event she hosted last fall with Quebec mystery writer Louise Penny. “It was sold out in late August,” Hunter says. “Everyone was holding their books up in the air for Louise to take a snapshot on her phone. That was a good indication to me of the kind of events we can do here.”

Building on that thriller-seeking audience demand, Hunter booked Reichs and Rankin for this fall – along with Michael Connelly, Janet Evanovich, Linwood Barclay, and David Lagercrantz, the Swedish author of The Girl in the Spider’s Web, the much-anticipated follow-up to Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy.

So how does the TPL attract such big names? Some are driven by altruistic motives – unlike its NYC counterparts, which charge up to $30 a ticket, the Appel Salon offers free admission (staying true to the spirit of a traditional salon and the library’s mandate as an accessible public institution). “For some authors, certainly that’s part of the reason they come,” says Hunter. “I think that was the case with Lena Dunham. … I think she really wanted to get in front of her fans and we do have a fairly unique outreach through all the branches.”