Postales del Paraíso: The Guadalajara Book Fair

Postales del Paraíso

 The Guadalajara Book Fair

The Guadalajara Book Fair was this week and it is extraordinary! We spent all day there on Saturday and it wasn’t enough time to explore everything we wanted to see and do. With over 2,000 publishers from 47 nations spanning the globe, it’s the largest book fair in the western hemisphere and the second largest in the world just behind Frankfurt, Germany.

The danger here is that this is a place where, as Schopenhauer said “men of learning can read themselves stupid”. The volume of books is overwhelming. The breadth and depth of the assortment is breathtaking. There are art books, novels, classics, short stories, and coffee table books. There are comic books, graphic novels, children’s books, academic textbooks, poetry, even a section of rare and antique publications. And then there is my new favorite, dual language books, Cervantes, for example, with Spanish on the left page and English on the right. The selection is mindboggling, and if the shear volume of books to read is not enough there are also audio books, lectures, and films. There is great risk of giving in to temptation here, as someone has said before, I would buy more books if only I could also buy the time to read them.

There is a featured country each year. Last year it was Brazil, this year it was Portugal, and although that country has a 900 year history of producing extraordinary writers and artists, the focus here was on the modern. The writings of Nobel Laureate José Saramago, and two other Pritzker Prize recipients featured prominently along with film, lectures, music, and poetry that highlight the culture and arts in Portugal.

The graphic novels and comic books section was an unexpected delight. I was taken back not only by the diversity of the crowds but the range of topics, the creativity, the artistic expression, and the number of volumes addressing issues from politics to poetry, from the environment to science fiction. This section of the fair, more than others represents our future. These writers are young and engaged, they are accomplished thinkers and artists giving voice to new ideas and challenging the status quo. These will be some of the great writers of the next generation.

The usual cacophony, urgency, and frantic pace of a gathering of over 800,000 jostling down narrow aisles is here, but the expected enormous noise and typical hype of the publishers is reduced to a murmur as lips move in silence, faces buried in the inner flap of a book cover. 

This is an annual event held each Nov/Dec. at Expo Guadalajara on Avenida Mariano Otero and it runs for nine days. Don’t miss it next year!