In “The Party’s Over,” the NY Times lament the loss of the book parties of the halcyon days of publishing. Why throw a party for a book? Fran Lebowitz, the veteran partygoer and writer, says that it is for the author: “When you finish a book — not that I have a lot of experience finishing them — it’s such a Herculean effort that you feel that you deserve everything. It’s like coal mining. The only people I feel sorrier for are coal miners. And they never have parties, they sometimes don’t live through the day. But I’m sure if you ask them each day when they come out of the mine if they think they’d want people passing around canapés, they’d say yes.” Leave it to the NY Times to imagine that coal miners secretly desire canapés.