A week of records for Catalan Book Week

The 37th edi­tion of La Set­mana del Lli­bre en Catalán (Cata­lan Book Week) will break some records and see the high­est pos­si­ble num­ber of par­tic­i­pants in terms of pub­lish­ers. It will not be easy for the event to grow much more if it re­mains in the lim­ited space around Barcelona cathe­dral.

At the press con­fer­ence for its pre­sen­ta­tion, Montse Ayats, pres­i­dent of Ed­i­tors.cat, ex­plained the ex­pe­ri­ence since her new team took the reins around eight years ago. “We re­alised the po­ten­tial of the event and have man­aged to meet the chal­lenges we set for our­selves.” Ed­i­tors.cat has 96 mem­bers who, de­spite being com­peti­tors, have joined forces for the com­mon good. “We co­op­er­ate to com­pete,” be­cause the aim is “to in­crease read­ing fig­ures in Cata­lan.”

Joan Sala, the pres­i­dent of Cata­lan Book Week, noted that “it is an­other year of records, with more book­stores, more pub­lish­ers and more new ac­tiv­i­ties.”

Around 270 ac­tiv­i­ties are sched­uled, with the fol­low­ing sum­mary in terms of num­bers: 219 ex­hibitors dis­trib­uted among 62 mod­ules; 260 new pub­lish­ers, tens of thou­sands of ti­tles and 500 mag­a­zines; 12 lit­er­ary itin­er­aries, and 250 book sign­ings. On this last point, Sala wanted to make it clear that they did not want to “be­come a new Sant Jordi”: “Book sign­ings are very dif­fer­ent. There are no long queues and there’s a close­ness be­tween the reader and the au­thors and ed­i­tors,” he said.

There will also be a new way of pre­sent­ing the books, in the for­mat of a fake radio pro­gramme, “to make it more agile”, said Sala, who took ad­van­tage of the pres­ence of the Cata­lan cul­ture min­is­ter, Mariàngela Vi­lal­longa, to re­quest sub­si­dis­ing comics in Cata­lan, be­cause “many reg­u­lar read­ers of comic books in Cata­lan have to change over to Span­ish when they are 14 be­cause they have no other choice.” Vi­lal­longa took note and added that “Cata­lan Book Week is a suc­cess­ful for­mula that unites the whole book chain, but also all of the in­sti­tu­tions.”

The bud­get for the event is around 500,000 euros, al­though it is quite an elas­tic fig­ure. “The Week has two clear sides to it: the book fair, which is fi­nanced by sales and pri­vate spon­sors, and the lit­er­ary fes­ti­val, which we try to fund with the pub­lic money we re­ceive,” said Sala.

On this sub­ject, Sala com­mented that the or­gan­i­sa­tion has filed a law­suit against the Span­ish trea­sury for still not hav­ing re­turned the VAT cor­re­spond­ing to the Weeks of 2015 and 2016, which amounts to over 150,000 euros in total.

Dur­ing the Week, Margrit Lömker and Oriol Ser­rano, from the dis­trib­u­tor Les Punxes, will be pre­sented with the Life­time Achieve­ment Award, there will be an extra prize for Cav­all Fort mag­a­zine, and the spe­cial guest will be Swede David Lager­crantz, con­tin­uer of the Mil­len­nium saga.

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