The world book market is a business of more than US$140 billionwhich is estimated to continue increasing to reach US$165 billion at the beginning of the next decade. In Argentina, due to the economic crisis, the panorama is different. This year, sales until May fell 30% and then began a slight recovery.
To encourage purchases there were several initiatives, but they should not only focus on marketing but also on actions that make readers approach books in an easier and more playful way.
With the new edition of the Night of the Bookstores in the city of Buenos Aires, sales were encouraged. Thousands of people participated on Corrientes Avenue and in other areas.
It is a good initiative to promote the book, if it is accompanied by experiences that seek precisely to encourage reading.
On this occasion there were interesting presentations, among them that of the Borges Foundation, with a tour of the texts of the author of “Fervor de Buenos Aires” referring to the city, with readings by Lucas Adur, Claudio Gallardou and Paloma Contreras, and with videos from “Imaginary Beings of Borges”, with these titles: “General Quiroga goes by car when he dies”, “Mythical Foundation of Buenos Aires”, and “Death and the compass” (they are, along with many more, with free access at seresfantasticos.com).
Imaginary Beings is a project that has been carried out since 2017 within the framework of CABA Patronagean initiative to promote reading, with printed and digital publications, and more than 80 videos, with stories by Borges, read by María Kodama and cultural personalities, illustrated by Mariana Bendersky and others, with activities to work with students, guided by teachers or parents, so that they are encouraged to make narrations or drawings.
In that sense, it is good to carry out and support projects that facilitate access to creations, with concrete experiences, such as the one carried out by Borges himself when he was invited by Literature professor Jorge Bergoglio SJ, to a school in the province of Santa Fe, to encourage young people to write. The result of this activity is a book, “Original stories”which the author of “El Aleph” prologued, which today is in the Personal Library of Pope Franciswith a prologue by the Pontiff, with the stories that his students made.
For years I have decided to republish it, with the collaboration of the compiler Jorge Milia (former student of Bergoglio), but I didn’t find anyone who wanted to do it. Finally, after a conversation with the director of the Cervantes Institute of Spain, the brilliant poet and professor Luis García Montero, That institution decided to publish it soon, with a new text from the Pope.
It is a good example of what can be achieved when you seek to create that happy meeting between readers and writers.
Jorge Luis Borges imagined paradise as a form of library. In “The Borges Library” (Paripé Books) I wrote about those works that that writer kept until the end of his days, which today are in the Borges Foundation, which caused him so much happiness.
He highlighted that he earned written friendships that honored him, he felt close to those writers he read, and in some cases for him reading them was like talking to a friendly ghost.
He found happiness in the books of Thomas De Quincey, of whom he writes: “I owe so many hours of personal happiness to no one,” Enoch A. Bennett, of whom he highlights the many happinesses that await us in his book “Buried in Life”, José María Eça Queiroz, because “the mind of the reader joyfully welcomes that impossible fable” of “The Mandarin”, by Montaigne, Sir Thomas Browne or Stevenson, since discovering them “is one of the lasting happinesses that literature can bring”, by Henry James, who Jean Cocteau, who knew the mysterious poetry and “exercised it with happiness”, “The Aeneid”, which he cites as the extensive poem filed, line by line, with that careful happiness that Petronius noticed in the compositions of Horace, Voltaire, who never abandoned the happiness of writing, Emerson, who was, despite a lung infection, “instinctively happy,” and Lawrence of Arabia, of whom he notes the “pleasure of the literary exercise”, to cite just a few examples.
Surely that happiness is what the thousands of people who populated the streets and bookstores on the Night of the Bookstores also experienced.
*Fernando Flores Maio is a sociologist, journalist, writer and vice president of the Borges Foundation.
by Fernando Flores Maio
