Knots, Clips and Colours: How a Festival Lanyard Does the Talking

You hand over your ticket at a village hall just off the high street, and before you've found somewhere to put your coat, someone has looped a ribbon over your head. Within about four minutes, everyone in the room has read it. Not deliberately, necessarily. But a lanyard sits at sternum height, which is roughly where the human gaze rests when it is pretending not to look at anything in particular.

I have spent a good chunk of this year's festival season paying attention to those ribbons, and to what people do with them. It turns out the humble lanyard is the most efficient piece of social technology on site — a single glance that tells you who to ask about the loos, who might sign your book, who definitely can't help you, and who is probably owed a cup of tea.

The Colour Wheel

Ask an organiser about the colour scheme and you'll get a shrug and a practical answer. Stewards need to be findable in a crowded hall. Committee members need to be recognisable to the front of house team. Authors need something that says "I am not lost, I am working." Press need to be identifiable without being conspicuous.

In practice, though, the palette is doing something subtler. At a festival near Tring in September, a volunteer told me she could read the entire room from the door. "Pink is committee," she said. "Pink means don't ask me a question, ask them — and point at someone in green." Green, in her case, was stewards. Blue was weekend ticket-holders. The authors, she said, were in the pale yellow, and the pale yellow was very slightly the nicest ribbon in the box.

That last detail wasn't an accident, she admitted. "You want authors to feel looked after. It's a small thing. But it's a thing."

Length Is the Real Tell

Colour is the obvious signal; length is the interesting one. A hip-length ribbon suggests someone who will be leaning over a table, crouching to a child's eyeline, or otherwise unable to wear a card close to the chin. Booksellers and signing-table volunteers almost always get the long ones. Short, close-fitting ribbons tend to go to people who need to move quickly and don't want a card swinging into a microphone.

Then there's the clip. A plain plastic hook says standard issue. A metal swivel clip, the sort that costs about 40p more per unit, says somebody sat down and thought about the budget for your category. "We upgraded the clips for the authors this year," one programmer told me, slightly sheepishly. "It's the cheapest way we could think of to say thank you."

The Laminate Question

Entirely separate from the ribbon is the card itself, and this is where the hierarchy gets properly vertical. A printed paper insert, folded and slightly furred at the edges by 11am, is the entry level. A proper plastic card is the middle tier. The rigid pass — the thick, credit-card-stiff thing with the metal bulldog clip — is the top of the tree, largely because it is the only one that costs real money to produce.

At a festival in south Buckinghamshire this summer I watched a volunteer quietly swap her paper insert for a laminated card between panels, on the grounds that the paper one had gone limp in the drizzle. "It's not a promotion," she said. "It's waterproofing." Nobody believed her, least of all her.

What Happens in the Queue

The signing queue is the lanyard's natural habitat. A reader who has been trying to work out whether the person next to them is an author, a publicist or an extremely well-read attendee can settle the question with a downward glance and a friendly opener. "Are you on later?" is the standard approach, and it works because the lanyard has already answered half of it.

Novelist Tom Beresford, who has done four festivals this year, reckons the card changes the way strangers talk to him, for better and occasionally worse. "At a festival I'm approachable in a way I'm not on a train," he said. "Which is lovely, mostly. But you do occasionally get cornered by the loos at half nine at night by someone who's been saving up a plot question since March."

The Green Room Door, and the Pub Afterwards

The green room is where the lanyard stops being a conversation-starter and becomes a door policy. There is a particular look — a brief, polite glance at chest height, then a step back and a smile — that everyone recognises and no one enjoys being on the wrong end of.

And then there's the pub. After the last panel, when the chairs are being stacked and the bookstall is being packed into the boot of a car, half the lanyards come off and get stuffed into bags. The other half stay on. Those are the ones who are still, technically, working, and who will be the last to leave.

So Can It Ever Be Egalitarian?

Literary festivals like to think of themselves as the most democratic rooms in publishing. A ticket buys you a seat in the same hall as everyone else, and for eighty minutes you are simply an audience. The lanyard is the small print on that promise: a quiet, colour-coded reminder that access has levels, and that levels have colours.

Most organisers I spoke to were cheerfully unbothered by the idea. The badges solve a real problem — who on earth do I ask about the accessible entrance — and nobody has yet invented a better system. But it's worth noticing that we all, readers and writers and volunteers alike, look down before we look up.

The good news is that the whole apparatus comes off. By ten o'clock, the only people still wearing a ribbon are the ones folding the tablecloths. And they'll tell you anything you want to know, festival pass or not.