Reading the reports coming out of last week’s Bologna Children’s Book Fair brought back a lot of memories and filled me with longing. Oh, to have been strolling those aisles, admiring that fascinating array of books, and eating that food!

I had the immense honor of attending the Bologna Fair five years ago as a "guest of the fair."  Wanting to increase the attendance of book professionals outside of the publishing industry, the fair itself sponsored three contests in 2003 (one through ABC and two through SCBWI), all on the theme of "the importance and difficulties of books in translation." They paid for the travel, accommodations, and convention passes of three winners: a children’s bookseller (me), a children’s book author (Lisa McCourt), and a children’s book illustrator (Kathryn Hewitt). Lisa unfortunately had to postpone her visit by a year, so we didn’t cross paths at the fair, but Kathryn Hewitt and her daughter Annalise became fast friends with me and my school librarian friend Joanne Cimato, who accompanied me on the trip.

I call the fair "vast" because it’s huge, especially in the amount of information it throws at you, much of which is visual (unless you can read in several languages), and much of which is baffling, unless you’re very familiar with the world of rights buying (which I was and am not). I left the fair each day with my eyes aching and my brain overflowing with questions, most of which were answered for me after I’d returned to the States, where I knew more people at whom to direct them. How do rights buyers decide what to buy? Why does Random House in the U.S. not publish more books from Random House in the U.K.? Why did so many of the French books have such incredible illustrations but bizarre story lines? Why? Why? Why?

This is one reason the fair sometimes seemed "intimidating" — I was constantly at risk of information overload! The other, though, was the fact that to a bookseller accustomed to shows like BEA, NEIBA, and even ALA (which I’ve experienced once) exploring the booths at Bologna feels very different, and not necessarily for obvious reasons. It was the modes of interaction within publishers’ booths that I was most surprised by.

At Bologna, no one was trying to market their books to me, or (it seemed) to many other "passersby." In fact, at Bologna relatively few people spoke to me or to Joanne at all, unless we pointedly engaged them in conversation. On the one hand this was nice! It meant we were free to look at books, without interruption, to our hearts’ content. But on the other it was a bit… awkward. Most of the people in the booths at the show were there with the sole intention of doing business, much of it behind closed doors, most of it with people they already knew and with whom they had pre-arranged meetings. Often tables in a publisher’s booth would be crowded with folks having conversations — some of them intense, some of them filled with raucous laughter. Meanwhile we folks wanting to look at books milled about on the booths’ fringes, barely catching anyone’s notice, and occasionally feeling downright intrusive.

This happens sometimes at BEA too, but less frequently than I saw it at Bologna, as there’s almost always a marketing or publicity person in a BEA booth who is there for the sole purpose of talking up books to interested passersby. Interested passersby at BEA are, after all, booksellers and librarians and other book lovers who are making decisions about what to purchase for their stores or collections. In Bologna, booksellers, librarians and assorted other book lovers aren’t the show’s focus, obviously, as we aren’t purchasing publishing rights. In fact, in most cases, we wouldn’t even have the option of purchasing a fraction of the books we saw in Bologna unless they wind up being purchased and published Stateside. Bologna is, first and foremost, a rights convention. But in these days of convenient global communications, most Bologna business has been arranged in advance of the fair. Gone are the days when foreign import books were "discovered" when a publisher just happened to pick up a book in a Bologna booth and think, "I can sell this in the millions!"

This makes the actual books at Bologna, then, seem largely unnecessary — trappings intended to show the world a publisher’s size and style, in a world where the insiders already know those things and outsiders aren’t key to the business at hand. It’s interesting to me that publishers spend tremendous amounts of money to design, rent, and fill their booths with books shipped from distant shores, when they really don’t HAVE to anymore.

To my mind this makes the pavilions at Bologna akin to the opening ceremony of the Olympics. Both are technically unnecessary to the proceedings that follow but important in their message of global unity, their visual representation of a world with a common interest or collective spirit. At the opening ceremony for the Olympics it’s sport and the importance of healthy competition. At Bologna, it’s books and the importance of reading.

And OH the books to be seen and read in Bologna! It’s truly a visual feast. Take a look at any of the Bologna Annuals if you don’t know what I mean. Or better still, hop a flight yourself some year! First, though, I recommend lining up a few publishing contacts who’ll be there to answer your inevitable string of questions. And second, get over yourself, because while you’re adrift in a sea of books and peering over the shoulders of international publishing giants, you will realize just how small you really are. For a few hours, anyway.

If you don’t enjoy that sensation, you needn’t worry. Just pop into a good Bologna restaurant and in no time flat you can make yourself feel PLENTY large again. (Pasta is excellent for that!)

Here’s a photo of me and Joanne in front of the essay that earned me a trip to the fair:

The contest-winning essays and artwork were displayed on a wall as you entered the exhibit halls. I almost fell over when I saw that my words were displayed there for all to see. (SCARY… And not unlike blogging!)

Here’s the illustration that earned Kathryn Hewitt a trip to the fair:

When you’re not looking at books at the fair, you’re looking at illustrations for or from books! The Illustrators’ Cafe features the pieces selected for inclusion in that year’s Bologna Annual. And an enormous billboard, photographed below, allows illustrators from all over the world to tack up samples of their work + contact information. It’s quite a draw, as you can see in the two photos below.

Here’s me admiring one of my FAVORITE illustrations o
n
display in the Illustrators’ Cafe. Less than a year later I saw it again — on the pages of the wonderful On My Way to Buy Eggs by Chih-Yuan Chen, published by Kane/Miller.

The beaded bracelet I’m wearing above is one I bought on the streets of Florence (where Joanne and I spent a couple of days before the fair). It matches the rainbow-striped "PACE" (peace) flags we saw everywhere in Italy that year, hung in reaction to the Iraq war, which had just begun. Here’s a powerful poster Joanne and I saw in a Bologna display window one day:

On a happier note, here’s what we saw on the "streets" of Venice (a short trip from Bologna), when we traveled there for half a day with Kathryn and Annalise: