Sitting under a tree with two books – one on her leg and the other in her hand – Gilda Reyes looked at her new literary acquisitions while looking at her daughter and grandchildren who also had several texts. She was looking at the cover of Presumption, by Julia Barrett. The copies had been given away in Caracas on the occasion of the day of the book.
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On April 23, 2022, some activities timidly returned in the Venezuelan capital to celebrate the date. Gilda Reyes and her family took advantage of one of these to add volumes to her library. Being an educator, her grandchildren inherited a taste for reading and accompanied her.
“Venezuela is a country accustomed to reading novels, poetry and history,” says Melissa Nahmens, founder of the What to Read project, which annually distributes free literature to encourage the habit. On Saturday 23 they distributed 200 copies of different genres.
But, that Venezuelans “are reading” does not mean that they are buying works or that there is a great literary production in the country and this is due to several factors. The use of the Internet and high prices limit the acquisition of new texts, and publishers are struggling to stay afloat.
A few years ago it was common to see young people reading while traveling on the Caracas subway. After the collapse in the transportation system, after the pandemic, they decreased the practice. Nor is there an effective campaign by the State, despite in the country there is the Manuel Vadell National Reading Plan 2019-2025 promoted by the Ministry of Popular Power for Culture through the National Book Center (Cenal).
There are also no recent figures on the level of reading. The last survey carried out by Cenal on reading behavior and access to books was in 2012, which cIt concluded that 50.2 percent of Venezuelans make up the reading population. At that time the number of inhabitants stood at 29,000,000, today the population should add up to more than 33 million, but with the 6,000,000 of the migratory exodus it stands at 28,000,000.
The report of the Regional Center for the Promotion of Books in Latin America and the Caribbean (Cerlac) in its 2020 study entitled “The Ibero-American space of the book” draws the panorama in a tailspin in terms of the production of texts, number of authors and publishers In Venezuela.
Until that date, Brazil, Argentina and Colombia led the list of countries with the highest literary production.
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The Cerlac details thatIn Venezuela, for the first time since 2013, ISBN requests, which is a number assigned to each new book, stopped falling in 2020. In the last seven years, the variation had been negative, standing at -6.08 percent. In 2020, 2,186 ISBNs were delivered, an increase of 17.9 percent compared to 2019.
Although the number sounds high, the reality is that it is still low. In Colombia in 2020, 20,378 ISBNs were granted. In Mexico, 20,925. The book industry in Venezuela has suffered the consequences of the crisis.
What about publishers?
Over the years, publishing houses have disappeared in the country. The Cerlac 2020 report has the numbers. In 2019, Venezuela had 263 commercial publishers, 293 university publishers and 368 public publishers, contrasting with Mexico, which has 14,468 commercial publishers and 5,667 university publishers. Colombia with 7,135 and 4,663, respectively; Chile with 4,343 and 741 university students.
Venezuela is one of the few countries that has more publishers from public entities that include mostly the State, this being a route to know what is distributed in the country.
“As long as there is a book there will be civilization and culture. The Venezuelan has to read. By reading we can understand what has happened to us”, says Sergio Dhabar, director of Editorial Dhabar, in a conversation with EL TIEMPO.
Right in a conversation for Book Day, Dhabar, who continues to bet on publishing texts and supporting authors, reiterates that although sales are now lower, he tries to maintain the record of 15 annual publications.
“We are not only interested in the sale issue, we are interested in there being a possibility of publishing books and that people can, even if they are few, access them.”
The authors and prospects
According to Cerlac, from 2014 to 2019 the number of authors has decreased in the country and went from 481 to 290. One of those who remains active is the renowned historian Inés Quintero. “It’s not a story, it’s history” -which is part of the Dhabar Editorial catalog- is one of her successes with which she shows what happened in the past in a different way.
“Bookstores are a special and luxurious place for us to be here”, says Quintero in the midst of twenty people who decided to celebrate the book inside a bookstore in Caracas in a conversation.
For Quintero, who is currently a Member of the National Academy of History, it is important that beyond the difficulties, the historians of this time have the “responsibility” to assert what history means as a sense of belonging and as a critical look at the present, especially in Venezuela.
For the youngest, having a career like Quintero’s is uphill. “It’s very difficult to study when you’re hungry,” laments university professor Francis Lugo, quoting writer Virginia Woolf.
“It is very difficult to study when you are hungry”
Lugo tells this newspaper how complex it has become to study letters and he does so from his experience at the department of letters of Latin American literature at the Central University of Venezuela (UCV).
It is not only the reduced publishing market and bookstores -he says- but the boys sometimes do not have the resources to buy the books or obtain the materials “although university is free there are other needs”.
For her, it is an “act of romance” to study for a degree and that is why students know from early on that they should look for jobs that, through remuneration, allow them to complete their studies and become potential authors.
Those same precariousness sometimes make initiatives like “What to Read” successful, because people can get books for free. “I took these poetry books, I like them a lot,” commented a girl in the middle of the fair.
Those who have some extra economic resource go to an iconic place in the center of Caracas and it is the Bridge of the Armed Forces. Under the concrete structure, a space with more than 30 cubicles was designed where used books are the protagonists. Good deals can be had: Don Quixote for $1, or José Saramago’s Essay on Blindness for $3 and still packaged. There are thousands if not millions of books in that place. They accumulate by towers.
“Sometimes we give offers of four books for one dollar,” says Dalia Delgado, one of the site’s booksellers. Next to her, José Villareal remembers how 25 years ago the situation was different. “It sold a lot,” repeats the man who has dedicated all this time to being a bookseller.
Villareal also remembers that during the two years of the pandemic, people bought books because of the running of the bulls, but now everything is down again. “Novels and self-help books are sold, but during the day we can sell even a single book”, details the man with an air of nostalgia and in the midst of the noise and smoke of the cars that pass endlessly everywhere.
book fairs
A few years ago there were six book fairs in Venezuela, but between 2016 and 2017 budgetary reasons made them disappear. The fairs of the University of Carabobo, the University of Los Andes, the Caribbean International Book Fair and the Mayor’s Office of Chacao are among them, as Marcelino Bisbal, director of Abeditions of the Andrés Bello Catholic University (UCAB), listed them. of studies that at the end of 2021 resumed the initiative.
In that event, Bisbal recalled that Today there are only two fairs left, that of the UCAB and the Filven, organized by the Government, which it defined as ideologized.
Despite the panorama, there are those who are committed to recovering the incentive for reading and new authors, such as the Fundación para la Cultura Urbana and the Poeteca. The former continues to publish copies against all odds and the latter has earned a place with the annual Rafael Cadenas poetry prize, in which the youngest show off their talent.
Families like Gilda Reyes’s also try to preserve the value of books through the generations, in a country where the economic, political and social crisis has hit the deepest, including the acquisition of knowledge.
ANA RODRIGUEZ BRAZON
WEATHER CORRESPONDENT
CARACAS
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