The room contained editors. Reviewers. Book designers. Children’s lit students. Booksellers. Writers. Professors. Librarians. And books.

Children’s Books Boston’s Third Annual Fall Reception and Book Swap, held at Simmons College, on Thursday, September 3, was a simple concept. Show up. Bring a book to swap, and fill out a card explaining why you liked it. Eat. Drink. Chat, probably about books.

For the sort of people interested in a reception hosted by CBB, an organization “dedicated to providing a shared space for interaction and discussion among greater Boston companies, institutions, groups, and individuals who work with children’s books,” the book-swap element was no problem. The table filled with recent books, galleys of soon-to-be-published books, classics, and everything in between. Some attendees stuck new literary discoveries in their bags. A few regretfully declined to do so, citing the groaning shelves already in their lives.

Mostly, we mingled. There was chatter about Simmons classes, about big and small publishers, about babies and Orphan Black and (of course) books. CBB partners Cathie Mercier of Simmons, Yolanda Scott of Charlesbridge, and our own Roger Sutton broke in briefly to welcome us and tell us about the year’s upcoming CBB events: a winter “postmortem” for the ALSC awards, and a reprise in the spring of the Wicked Boston Children’s Book Trivia Challenge.