NewsLatin AmericaThe FIL puts a candle to the book and another to the ball

The FIL puts a candle to the book and another to the ball

Aspect of the Sharjah pavilion, guest of honor country at the FIL of Guadalajara.Roberto Antillon

The smallest booth, the biggest screen. This is the presence of Amazon in the FIL of Guadalajara, which this Saturday opened its doors in a big way after a strictly virtual 2020 due to the pandemic and 2021 at 50% capacity as a precaution. Going big at FIL means that in the next nine days the Zapopan Expo venue (the local Ifema) awaits the 800,000 visitors of normal years. If we think that the last fair in Frankfurt, the largest in the world, received 73,500 tickets two months ago (yes, for five days), we will get an idea of ​​the mammoth popular dimension of the Mexican event.

The FIL measures 43,000 square meters, that is, about six soccer fields. The equivalence is not trivial, and less this year. At 1:00 p.m., minutes after the solemn opening ceremony, the Amazon screen connected with Qatar to broadcast the match between Argentina and Mexico (2-0). We know that Jeff Bezos wants to buy the Washington Commanders, an American football team, but his company prides itself on giving the client what he asks for. And this Saturday he asked for the ball. Giant replicas of various books hung from the ceiling as props. The fashion ones, of course: Lord of the Rings, One Hundred Years of Solitudedy ―miracles of the god of soccer, that is, of Maradona― the edition of the Herder publishing house of Man’s Search for Meaning, the essay written by Viktor Frankl after his time at Auschwitz. Psychology fans began to search for him massively on the Internet after Luis Enrique, the Spanish coach, declared that it had been a decisive reading for him.

In Mexico Planeta has the rights to Garcia Marquez. In the rest of the Spanish-speaking countries they belong to their great rival and neighbor in the FIL, Penguin Random House

Amazon rules in the book world but at FIL it takes refuge, discreetly, in a side corridor. Whoever holds power does not need to show off. A few meters from the pavilion of the guest country, Sharjah, the leading role is taken by the stands of Planeta and Penguin Random House, veritable condominiums flanked by Fondo de Cultura Economica, the giant of public publishing, and Sexto Piso, the giant of small : its space shelters 30 independent labels from America and Spain (from Tumbona to Minuscula through Astiberri or Godot).

If Penguin boasts of having -half with Siruela-, with the pocket edition of the most cited title at the inauguration ―infinity in a reed, by Irene Vallejo―, Planeta takes advantage of a curious Mexican exception. In 2006 he bought the Diana publishing house, whose catalog has its own god: Gabriel Garcia Marquez. For this reason, and to celebrate 40 years since the Nobel Prize was awarded to a Colombian author, he has filled his shelves with reissues and yellow butterflies while he is preparing to fill the skin of visitors with stickers with the famous lepidoptera. In the rest of the Hispanic world, the rights to those same books belong to its great rival: the penguin multinational. Nothing similar had been seen since Di Stefano signed for Barca and Real Madrid at the same time.

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