In the bars they already prepare the crepes, the beers and the patatuelas. The curious begin to pry. The influencers They unholster their cameras. The bad news: in the application of the smartphone Little clouds and blue drops come out for every day of the week, what a downer. And Queen Letizia has declined the usual invitation, they say that because they are elections and it is not necessary to mix with the political class now. But the authorities, with more reason, will do the inaugural parade of it. So the blinds of the booths are rolled up and the real protagonists appear: the books. This Friday the 82nd Madrid Book Fair. The ancient rituals are back in motion.
The exercise of politics is a form of theatrical representation so that, in the presence of the cameras, public representatives, especially in campaigns, strive to engage in thoughtful conversations with publishers and booksellers. And some of these, who are not used to media life, withdraw, and it looks weird. “What’s up, do you want a photo?” says the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, very easygoing, to a gang of adolescents who look at him shyly and smiling. “Well, let’s get to it,” he resolves. Begoña Villacís, vice mayor, seems very into a children’s book and takes a selfie with a fan whom she intercepts by taking a photo of foreigners: “Man, let’s do it right.” She also comforts another about the result on Sunday: “You’ll see, you’ll see how we did come out.” Many books, and many photos, in a string of pavilions from such and such an institution. Politicians are now approaching the great structure in the shape of a brain that the Higher Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) has set up, because science is the guest of the fair this year, which raises the malicious hilarity of the common people: “A see if something sticks to them”, says someone out there. And politicians get into the gray matter, and not the other way around.
The Minister of Culture and Sports, Miquel Iceta, who has come on behalf of the government, buys books at a record-breaking rate, even bursting the machines. “What nerves, the POS didn’t work for me and I couldn’t charge the minister,” says Christina Linares, from the Renacimiento publishing house. The book was about Melchor Rodríguez García, the anarchist known as the red angel, which saved so many lives of ideological enemies in the Civil War. Iceta also takes Leonora Carrington or Rafael Cadenas (in whose Cervantes award ceremony she recently participated), among many others. “Whenever I come to the Fair, like on Sant Jordi, I have a buying anxiety attack,” she says. Marta Rivera de la Cruz, current Minister of Culture, Tourism and Sports of the Community of Madrid, promises to return for the edition of In Search of Lost Time, by Marcel Proust, which is published by the Alba publishing house, and which weighs a lot. “Tomorrow I come for her,” he says.
The director, Eva Orúe, is happy: this fair is more like the fair she imagines. She started last year and had to get out of a pandemic. “I notice a certain euphoria, joy, we have modernized,” she explains at the end of the institutional parade, which has turned out to be more informal and chaotic than when the queen (who is famous, by the way, for being an informed and rigorous reader) appears. In this edition there are celebrated novelties: clearer signage and the division of the fair into blocks, measures that facilitate transit through the venue, and awnings to combat that violent sun that mercilessly struck down readers on some afternoons. Now it is a “dermosaludable” space, according to the Healthy Skin Foundation. Unpublished booths are also tested in the central space, with less visibility, but with opening to both sides, to reach those two rivers of walkers that form on the two banks of the fair. “It is scientific method, trial and error”, says the director. At the fair there are 361 exhibitors booths online and 24 in the central area (including 277 publishers and 113 bookstores) and the presence, in one way or another, of around 1,000 publishing labels,
At the book fair there are two main topics of conversation. First, the books. Second, the weather conditions. And the forecasts are bad, at least for the first week. “It’s not so much because of the sales, it’s that everything gets very sad,” says Marcos Almendros in his editorial booth, Casimiro Parker already said it, looking with one eye at Lawrence Ferlinguetti’s collections of poems and with the other at the threatening belly sky of donkey. “Perhaps instead of books we have to sell umbrellas,” says Dani Álvarez, from Hoja de Lata, somewhat somber. According to these omens, a color chronicle of this fair could only be gray. But it’s not a big deal. The famous bookseller Lola Larumbe, from the Rafael Alberti bookstore, as well as a member of the organizing committee, is optimistic. “In my experience, and I’ve been coming here since 1980, the fair tends to balance,” she explains, “even if the weather is bad the first week, people will reserve their desire to come the second week.” It’s like a physical law: the law of conservation of fairground desire.
What is a fair for?
“These weeks help to pass the summer trance like on tiptoe,” explains Pepo Paz, from the poetry publishing house, in his booth Bartleby, “but, more than anything, it is important to share experience with colleagues and to get to know the readers.” During these two weeks, the publishing and literary world concentrates on this Retiro promenade, in front of, inside and behind the booths, and in all the adjacent events and festivities. Bartleby is going to turn 25 and has been a fairgrounder for 14. He has emancipated himself: it is the first time that he appears with a booth not shared with another publisher, that is more than a good part of the Spanish youth can say.
The editorial demipage He has also been 14 years old, but he is turning 20. “The fair is a good time to forget about the spell of editorial novelties and impulsive consumption: here each label presents its entire catalog and the books make sense in their own context,” explains the publisher. David Villanueva. Putting the fund in value, the value of the editor as a demiurge of the label itself is also put. And as an anniversary celebration, he presents the choral book of unpublished stories twenty howls from the pianistwith authors such as Fernando Aramburu, Eloy Tizón, Pilar Adón or Blanca Andreu.
A fair is also useful to make a sample of what is called bibliodiversity, that is, that there are many types of books and publishers. If infinity is that which, although it seems to be ending, always offers more, this fair seems infinite. No matter how much one knows, there is always some publisher or some bookstore that he ignores, and then another. Institutions appear, the historical, the literary, the comic, the mainstream and the ultra-specialized.
Of course, also the childish. It is the case of the publisher kalandraka, which in front of its booth has a small wooden bleacher so that the little ones can stand up to see the books like the adults. A particularity of the children’s business is that they have sales at the high points of the fair, afternoons and weekends, when the adults come, but also on those somewhat lethargic weekday mornings, which is when some schools appear with a riot. “In some centers they plan the purchases that are going to be made, or they plan gymkhanas, and then the children come with their own money, also to learn how to buy a book”, explain the editors Mónica Corral and David Lacal. “There are families that come every year to have us recommend books: there are children that we have seen grow up and we no longer recognize”, they add.
Another novelty of this edition is the small fair called untamed, where 25 small or minuscule publishers come together that operate on the margins of commercial roads and that not only deal with books, but with fanzines, magazines, object books, artist books, assembled magazines, or, directly, small pieces of Arts. “We want to represent all those self-publishing fairs and small publishers that take place all year,” says Pepe Olona, from Outburst Books, organizers of the Poets festival and promoters of the initiative. It is about making the public see that there is another way of conceiving, producing and distributing books, which many times do not even look like books. Projects like La más bella, Escrito a lápiz, Media Vaca, the New Yorkers Ugly Duckling Presse or the Peruvians Álbum del universo bakterial. Only for the first weekend. “We are a fair within the fair. We are a party within the party”, concludes Olona.
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