The Cape Town Book Fair

Those of you in the business know that the Frankfurt Book Fair is the biggest, most important book show in the world. EBSCO is not a bookseller, but we go to Frankfurt in order to have meetings with many of the publishers with whom we work. Sometimes it’s a good chance to meet with publishers that don’t attend the American Library Association, which is the largest library association meeting in the world.

The organizers of Frankfurt decided to try a book show in South Africa, and they chose Cape Town. The first Cape Town Book Fair was held 17-20 June at the Cape Town International Convention Centre, a world-class convention venue. (In fact, I cannot figure out why the International Federation of Library Associations, IFLA, chose Durban instead of Cape Town for its 2007 conference. Cape Town is much nicer than Durban, and the CTICC is more than adequate.) Colleen, Salome Potgieter and I attended so that we could meet with some publishers, meet and greet our librarian customers who attended, and generally support the book fair.

It was wildly successful! Attendance exceeded expectations after the 2nd day; they had to print more tickets and hire more staff. I was really pleased by this, because SA is not a country with a strong reading culture. They have already booked the CTICC for next year, and I’m sure we’ll go again.

The stand next to ours was fun. It was three Irish ladies there to promote a book that one of them has written. It’s called Suitcase Number Seven, and is about the travails of an Irish rugby player named Tom Cleary (Ursula’s uncle, as it turns out). It’s a “fictional memoir.” The ladies – Ursula (the author), Yvonne and Nula (maybe short for Fionula?) – were so nice and fun. Ursula and Nula are going to travel around SA for a couple of weeks, and they will phone Colleen and me if they make it to Johannesburg. They’re following in the footsteps of Tom Cleary, who traveled here in 1961 with his team on a tour of SA.

A publisher called Jacana Media (based here in Jo’burg) had the cleverest display in their stand. They had the artwork or photos from their book covers printed on fabric and made pillows out of them. And then at the end of the conference, they sold the pillows! I was so excited when Colleen told me the pillows were for sale. I got one (that she had picked out and put aside for me; it was perfect) called The Drum Café’s Traditional Music of South Africa by Laurie Levine. The book came with a CD enclosed. The pillow did not. :)

We went down to Cape Town a couple of days before the book fair to call on customers. One of the visits we made was to the library at Parliament. Unfortunately, I didn’t get any photos of the Parliament buildings. You have to get permission from the PR office for that, and we didn’t have time. Maybe I will do so in advance on the next visit. But I did get some photos of the lovely library. I’m putting some of these in as individual posts.

The day before the fair, 16th June, was a public holiday – Youth Day. Colleen and I drove north of CT to visit an old friend of hers who has an orange farm. I’ll write a separate post about that day.