A Roaring Success, in Anyone’s Book

Rosa Maria Aburto and five friends sprawled on the cold marble floor of the Expo Guadalajara convention center and picked over their treasure. They had traveled hundreds of miles from Baja California to the International Book Fair here and now, just hours after the doors had opened, they had already filled a half-dozen bags with books.

Exhausted after several trips around the mammoth hall, they were nonetheless calling their visit an unqualified success.

“I love it! Es lo maximo,” Aburto said of the fair. “In Mexico, you can’t get any better than that.”

Apparently a lot of people share that opinion because the annual fair--which ended its nine-day run Sunday--has in just a decade grown into one of the largest and most important literary events in Latin America. And it’s also a big reason why, despite political turmoil and financial crisis throughout the region, publishers are doing a robust business in Latin America.

The fair has become so important that many publishers delay the release of new titles until Guadalajara, where--with 500 journalists and more than 8,000 industry types in attendance--new books are guaranteed international exposure.

In addition, there were signings by authors such as Carlos Fuentes and Isabel Allende, more than 380 panel discussions, forums and conferences on book-related topics, and two prestigious literary awards were presented.

That’s the kind of clout Raul Padilla Lopez, former rector of the University of Guadalajara, was after when he first hit on the idea of establishing a book fair in Mexico’s second-largest city. His plans were ambitious from the start, but with the Mexican publishing industry streaking toward disaster, nothing less would do.

In the beginning, “the book fair had two fundamental purposes,” said Padilla, 41. “One was to stimulate the book industry in Mexico and Latin America. At the same time, we were interested in putting on a cultural show for our region and our country.”

But stimulating interest in books in Mexico struck even publishers as a quixotic quest. Just half the nation’s 95 million people have more than a grade-school education, and even those who read have a hard time finding books, because there are fewer than 500 bookstores in the country.

“The idea of the fair was regarded with enormous skepticism by the Mexican publishing industry,” remembered Francisco Trillas, who was then president of the country’s book publishers association. “The reactions were that it was a folly.”

Nevertheless, it was apparent that to thrive--perhaps even to survive--many of the country’s publishers had to look abroad. So Padilla invited hundreds of foreign book sale professionals to Guadalajara to meet with Mexican publishers and, hopefully, do business. The event proved so successful that nearly four times as many book professionals showed for the second fair, and this year an estimated 250,000 visitors sampled books from 870 companies representing 30 countries, from Poland to Portugal, Spain to Singapore.

Thanks, at least in part, to the festival’s success, Mexico’s publishing industry is now expanding despite the country’s continuing fiscal woes. Exports were up $100 million last year, for example, while the Fondo de Cultura Economica, the country’s biggest imprint, has seen foreign sales increase by more than 150% since 1990. That’s a path others, such as Fernandez Editores, hope to follow. The 54-year-old company recently opened an office in Carson.

“The domestic market is shrinking, so exports, for us, are very important,” said Luis Fernandez, the company’s founder and director. “We have to look for new markets.”

Mexican publishers don’t have to look too far. The United States is the fifth-largest Spanish-language market in the world, according to Publishers Weekly, and Mexico sent nearly $50 million worth of books there last year.

But while Spanish-language publishers are aggressively courting book buyers in the U.S., at Guadalajara they’ve discovered that the relationship is reciprocal. Librarians (who make up 41% of the buyers at the fair), booksellers, distributors and other professionals have long struggled to supplement their often meager supply of quality Spanish-language literature.

“For a librarian, it’s almost like you’re a kid in a candy store,” said Rafael Gonzalez, a regional collection coordinator for the Los Angeles County Public Library System. “There’s so much material that is not available to us in the States. [And here] it’s all available under one roof.”

For Sandy Taylor of Curbstone Press, a feisty nonprofit publisher with a long line of Latin American-themed titles, the fair brings together the kind of people he’d have to travel to dozens of countries to meet otherwise.

“It’s really important for us to be there in terms of networking,” he said. “The directors of the fair are brilliant in terms of their enthusiasm in introducing people to each other. You get to talk to people on a personal level.”

Guadalajara has managed to carve out a unique niche by complementing the trade show aspect of its fair with an array of cultural events, a program of two dozen children’s workshops and an intensive four-day seminar on bilingual education.

“We wanted to give both qualities--professional and cultural,” said Cecilia Gonzalez, promotional coordinator for the bilingual education workshop. The seminar proved a worthwhile way for Janice Rodriguez, a teacher at Luther Burbank Middle School in Highland Park, to spend the Thanksgiving holidays.

“I learned some great things that couldn’t have been learned from books. I will go back and say this is the most wonderful thing that has ever happened,” she enthused. “Here the atmosphere is much more conducive [to learning] and you don’t fall back into English.”

The cultural aspects of the fair were equally valuable, Rodriguez said. “If we cannot feel and know the cultural background, the social background, the educational background of the people we teach, we can’t teach them effectively,” she said. “And if the majority of the people come from one place--in the case of my school, Mexico--maybe we should go there.”

But the bilingual teachers conference, first offered four years ago, is one of the few events associated with the fair that has actually shrunk over time. Rodriguez was one of just 66 who registered for the workshop this year, down from nearly 150 two years ago. Elsewhere the fair is growing rapidly--so much so a waiting list of prospective exhibitors was started two years ago and the most common complaint heard from visitors this month was that the festival was too crowded.

In an effort to manage some of that growth, Padilla’s staff staged a separate children’s book festival last spring even though, Cecilia Gonzalez said, “We were told it would be impossible to organize a children’s fair.”

The event drew 88,000 participants. There are plans for an even bigger fair in May.