The newly appointed administration of the Belgrade Fair announced a few days ago the schedule of events in September and October. One of them is 68th International Belgrade Book Fair.
Emphasizing that it will be the highlight of the autumn events, they remind that the Book Fair is one of the oldest and most important literary events in the region.
They also say that its main goal is to enable publishers, authors, booksellers, librarians, book distributors, multimedia companies and other actors to establish contacts, exchange experiences, conclude business agreements and achieve other types of business and cultural cooperation.
However, there is a well-founded doubt that the stated goal is unfeasible in practice.
Saturday, November 1
Namely, those who made the schedule of events decided that this year's Book Fair would be from October 25 to November 2. This means that Saturday, the most visited day, falls on November 1.
It is to be expected that the anniversary of the death of the 1 victims of the Novi Sad tragedy will be more important to the citizens of Serbia on November 16, and that they will not be interested in the Book Fair on that day.
Did the new management of the Fair forget about the commemoration of those for whose deaths no one has yet been held accountable, or does it not know that Saturday is the most visited day of the Book Fair?
Whatever. Both eventualities testify to the way the newly elected management of the Belgrade Fair works, how professional it is, and how well it knows what is important to it and what is not.
One note regarding the mentioned expertise: the most visited day of the Book Fair is the day of the highest profit for the Belgrade Fair. And because of that, it is illogical that if they didn't think of the publishers and the audience when making the schedule for the autumn events, why didn't they think of themselves?
They were just doing their job.
The publishers do not blame the Belgrade Fair for the time allotted to them, they believe that they were just doing their job by scheduling the fair's events. The only thing they can't help but notice is the perhaps unconscious, but certainly obvious need for publishers to be punished. Because, despite the Minister of Culture Nikola Selaković, they prove that patriotism is not built by printing books in Cyrillic, but by their content. And because they want to work even without financial assistance from the state. And especially because they talk about all this publicly and openly.
In the context of the way some other cultural events were organized this year, it seems that the Belgrade Fair was just doing its job. The same as the "Zrenjanin beer days", "Zaječar guitar festival", "Meetings at the Fortress" in Niš, "Bir Fest" in Belgrade, or the National Film and Television Festival in Zlatibor, which were held just to be held. That's why progressive normality is the only normality that this people needs to see, even though empty auditoriums are in front of their eyes, and beastly stages are empty without participants.
In the end, it's still up to the publishers to accept all that and to consciously go into the deep red, or to refuse to participate in it.
