The Madrid Book Fair traditionally represents the human struggle against the elements: heat, storms, the growth of the surrounding magnolia trees. Culture against nature.
The high temperatures, in fact, hit the first weekend, the one in which the most read text in Spain was probably Judge Calama’s order on the intertwining of former President Zapatero (the magistrate did not go to sign at the booths). But this year the threat was more theological: the historic visit of the Pope.
In the previous days there was confusion: it was not known if the problem was going to be an avalanche of people or rather a desert fair. A bookseller, who must have been somewhat claustrophobic, confessed to me his fears of ending up trapped in his booth, surrounded by the masses: “I’m going to get sick!” In the end, it wasn’t that big of a deal. It did affect weekend sales: “The Pope has done us a lot of harm,” a bookseller told me. The representative of God on Earth (although there is controversy about this) does not always identify with the Good in the world.
The book sector does not need the Pope to achieve the impossible: the “Spanish book miracle” was confirmed. The Federation of Editors’ Guilds of Spain (FGEE) reported during the fair that the sector is going like a cucumber, and has not stopped growing for twelve years. The fair also presented its provisional data on Sunday: 7.26 million euros in turnover and 430,845 copies sold measured until Thursday, June 11. They were not so miraculous: they are inferior to last year’s.
“Nothing that happens in the city is foreign to us. While waiting for the results of this last weekend, waiting to know if there has been a comeback, the results collected reflect the difficulties of a Fair in which on the central weekend many preferred to avoid the city center to avoid complications,” said director Eva Orúe. The theme of the next edition, in which the fair turns 60 in El Retiro, will be the evanescent genre of memory.
This year the fair was about humor, which is missing, so there were comedians like Eva Hache, Joaquín Reyes, or Ignatius Farray, and also authors with humor, like Jonathan Coe, Maitena, Mercedes Cebrián or Virginia Higa. In the talks, humor was addressed from all possible angles, to the point of exhaustion, but even the readers were funny. “Is everything for sale?” asked one at a booth. When they told him yes, he was interested in the price of a small wooden shelf that held the copies.
You hear things like that. “Look, the communist manifesto…Well, you have to read everything!” a man said to his partner. A young girl approached a booth and asked for a book of poems by Charles Bukoswki, “but make it fat!” Another appears somewhere else: “Do you have that book called Crime and punishment? I only have 10 euros!” A boy asks for a “cryptozoology manual in Spanish.” Another confesses that he has a “fatal fear of death, all his life.” And the one from further away says: “If someone tells you that the Earth is flat, you tell them: yes, yes, of course, very flat, very flat.”
Through the rectangle through which the fairgrounds see life pass, parades a megamix genetic that is the entire humanity. People with hats, people picking their noses, bored people, people with nervous tics who go through all the available titles one by one, people who lean on the counter to chat all afternoon as if it were a bar. The booths are the opposite of Bad Bunny’s house (another famous contemporary of the fair): everyone parades here with the body and the wallet that they have been given. Books, by the way, are a maximum luxury object at a price of 15 euros on average.
Although there are also famous people, literary and extra-literary, at the fair. Sometimes the fair ride seems like one of those videos generated by artificial intelligence that make unlikely mixes of famous people: Luis García Montero is signed there, Sonsoles Ónega opposite, Rosario Villajos there, Fernando Aramburu here, and this is Julián Hernández, the leader of Siniestro Total.
Queen Letizia spent one day as queen, at the inauguration, with great stir, and another day incognito, jeans, sunglasses, and almost no one noticed. Suddenly a scandal of hysterical screams arises that collapses the fair traffic. Will it be the Pope? No, it’s the content creator Iker Unzu, who unleashes the delirium of the fans. Today fame is so sectoralized that there are very famous people that few people know who they are. The youtubersthe famous, the TV presenters, with their long queues, usually generate the animosity of the most injured; But the fair is about books, not about high literature.
What other people don’t like are brands, which tend to mediate all aspects of our lives. Some of the most combative bookstores have covered the logo of Repsol, the sponsoring company, on the paper bags with a sticker. Since last year, the VIPS chain has been offering restaurant services and distributing its magazines insistently. “They have a monopoly,” a bookseller complains, “so they have airport prices.” Of course: there are pancakes.
The fair is ending and many are not aware of the miracle. “It is one of the great monuments of the city, it is incredible that for 17 days there are so many people buying books,” a veteran Catalan editor told me. “And in Madrid it seems that they don’t show their chest.”