AThere's also that: looking for a job the old-fashioned way, using a notice board. The large partition walls in the first hall of the 61st Children's Book Fair in Bologna will therefore only remain white for a short time. As soon as the trade fair doors open for the first time on Monday morning, visitors stream onto the site with bags and backpacks, often with folders under their arms. The portfolio holders are illustrators who soon have every inch covered with their posters, comics and business cards. Has anyone ever landed an order like this?
Of course, the largest children's book fair in the world is also about stories made of words, but above all and especially about those that are told with pictures. Illustrations, says Elena Pasoli, who has been the trade fair director for many years, are the heart of Bologna. On the exhibition grounds you can find them not only in the books themselves, but also in numerous exhibitions.
The “Silent Book Contest” chooses the best story without text, and the illustrator exhibition has provided an annual overview of the new talents and ideas in the genre since 1967. This year's guest country, Slovenia, has dedicated a kind of cathedral to its illustrators; on strips of fabric above the visitors' heads, the images on display are reminiscent of frescoes.
The fact that the range of books available for young children now extends far beyond funny animal stories and “Fireman Sam” is not a new finding. But even those who already knew how wide the spectrum of topics is, which even picture books now tell about, will come across surprises in Bologna.
Basically, there is nothing that you wouldn't trust children to do, whether it's war, death or gender issues. At the annual Bologna Ragazzi Awards, the special category “The Sea” was introduced this year because, according to the presenter of the awards ceremony, the big issues of our time can be found there: migration or the climate catastrophe.
How fun is it to tell children about death?
That sounds more pedagogical and difficult than it actually appears in many books. In their non-fiction book “Radies from Below”, which is nominated for the German Youth Literature Prize, the author Katharina von der Gathen and the illustrator Anke Kuhl treat the topic of death with a lot of humor: you can certainly laugh at particularly strange deaths here. And the young Italian illustrator Noemi Vola explains the useful side of crying in one of her books: If you cry a whole pot full, you no longer have to salt the pasta water.
You won't find children here: visitors to the children's book fair in Bologna, Italy.
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Image: Picture Alliance
How children find all this and whether some books are particularly popular with adults cannot be seen at the fair – the area is reserved for trade visitors. You won't find the smallest readers in the hallways. They meet elsewhere, in the Giannino Stoppani children's bookstore, for example. It has been located in the center of the old town for 40 years, in Via Rizzoli, just around the corner from the famous Piazza Maggiore.
It's Tuesday morning, just the first of four days at the fair is over, but the booksellers are already pretty exhausted. They actually close at half past seven in the evening, one of them says, but yesterday it took until half past nine for everyone to leave. Then tidy up and prepare for tomorrow. The next day, a few people were waiting in front of the shop door before it opened.
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