Feria de Libro - a low key Spring celebration

After the frenetic fiestas of the First and Second of May, and of San Isidro, Madrid's annual feria de libro seems restful

The Children's Tent at the Madrid Book Fair Shows its calendar of activities

A few days ago a friend alerted me that (unsurprisingly) my bookstore owning friend from Tres Cantos would be bringing her bookstore to one of the stalls at the Madrid feria de libro, which started on Friday and runs for the next two weeks.  She suggested we go say hi, which I thought was a good idea.  Then I realized that of course on the weekend another friend from outside of Madrid was most likely to be signing and presenting her new novel (she has a day job in Ponferrada, so during the week was unlikely).  After an exchange of texts, she confirmed that she was indeed signing Saturday evening from 7:00 to 9:00, and suggested that I stop by toward the end of her signing shift, so we could go have dinner afterward.

So yesterday evening I set out in the late afternoon sunshine and walked to the Retiro, since I hadn't really been out all day, and I wanted some exercise.  Just under an hour and a half brought me to the hordes of evening strollers in the Retiro, and as I wandered past the "Rosaleda" (formal rose garden) and along the crowded paths I saw large numbers of people heading back from the fair, and also a significant number heading towards it (along with a few overheard comments "Is this the right direction?"  "The sign said straight ahead."  "There are people with book fair bags coming from over there.")


Eventually I reached the far side of Retiro from Atocha, and found a line of people stretching at least a hundred meters, patiently waiting for autographs from the big name celebrity of the moment (she wasn't someone I'd heard of).  I made my way around them, and onto the long rows of casetas, or book stalls, lining both sides of the drive, with carpas (tents) forming a central island on the normally broad avenue, about evenly divided between sites for local radio and TV interviews, pavilions of "países invitados" and of course bars and cafés with outdoor tables, so people could stop and eat and drink in between their book browsing.

Saturday evening in the park: Book browsing and a few places to sit and have a drink and snack

The avenue was choked with people, even fairly late on a Saturday, but it was a distinctly local and low key crowd.  There were a fairly large number of children (given the pabellón de actividades infantiles and the large number of bookstores specializing in literatura juvenil e infantil that was hardly a surprise).  A couple were overtired and cranky.  (I saw one heading through the park away from the fair as I was arriving who was walking along clutching a book to his chest, and sobbing in the heartbroken and furious manner of a child who has not been given enough advance notice of plans.  The book was clearly not a sufficient gift to make up for his wrongs.  On the other hand, it would have been a brave person who tried to take it away from him, since that certainly would have dialed a Mark 1 crying-while-walking tantrum into a Mark 3 total meltdown.)  But most seemed cheerfully good humored and glad of the chance to wander through a forest of interesting shiny new books.  All the book stalls gave out paper bags with the logo of the feria del libro printed on them with purchases, and while the adults easily carried two or three of these little gift-sized bags dangling from one hand, some of the smaller children were proudly carrying little gift bags that were proportionally the size of rather large shopping bags, skimming only a few inches from the ground, and lugging their prizes with a determination reminiscent of kids that size carrying bags of Halloween candy.

There were also large numbers of older people (a number of gray haired and formally dressed older ladies inspected my friend's new novel with interest while I was chatting with her), and (as the photos show) a significant number of people of all intermediate ages as well.

Sunset in the Retiro

Perhaps the most striking thing, in contrast to San Isidro or the Semana Negra or similar, was the lack of loud music and general noise.  There was of course the hum of several thousand people outdoors having various conversations, and I did notice a sound stage had been set up which had perhaps been in use earlier in the day, but all in all, this was a very calm crowd, cheerful about an annual activity which is obviously loved and enjoyed, and happy to take advantage of a nice Spring afternoon to do some window shopping and browsing, and perhaps waste a little disposable income on small luxuries like books and cañas.  (Maybe more like the LA Book Fair than the Semana.)  One got the feeling that the majority of the crowd probably would go walking in the park on a nice Saturday afternoon anyway, and that this was simply a minor bonus allowing for some alleged cultural activity.  (There were certainly plenty of people walking in the park not along the drive where the feria was set up too.)

One of this year's países invitados, with a tent celebrating Dominican writers.

All in all, I found the feria both cheerful and restful.  I was firmly planning to not buy any books, though when I was chatting with my friend (whose book I already own), I noticed several books that looked really interesting.  One was a collection of essays Los ingleses vistos por nuestros abuelos, which aside from having a really wonderful cover photo, looked generally like an amusing take, and which I almost thought I could justify as novel research.  I heroically refrained.  I similarly refrained from buying either volume of a travel memoir of one Luis de Oteyza, a journalist who after some political activity in the early 1920s found it a good idea to travel outside of Spain for his health, and wrote a memoir De España a Japón, and a sequel (about Japan) En el remoto Cipango.  I actually thought those might be interesting to contrast with I Wonder as I Wander, which also takes a route east and ends up in Japan, but ten years later (when the political panorama in Asia had changed significantly).  I heroically restrained myself from all these purchases of books that were potentially relevant to research interests by reminding myself of weight allowances and space concerns in my suitcases.

But I broke down when I saw Ramón Carnicer's Nueva York: Nivel de vida, nivel de muerte, another travelogue, which (based on the reading I stayed up way too late last night doing) is essentially the inverse of this blog.  Carnicer was a linguist and historian of language, and I actually own one of his histories of the Spanish language (a long ago birthday present), though I admit I didn't initially connect the name to the book I own.  In 1968 he accepted a position as a visiting professor at Queens College for one semester, and the book is the result of his impressions of New York.  He doesn't name Queens College, and instead refers to the City University of New York and "the college" within it, but his vivid and hysterically funny description of his first attempt to get there by subway from West 72nd Street makes it clear where he's going.

"Next to the hotel there's a metro station.  The first station after that is Columbus Circle where I have to take another train.  After one more stop, another change to cross below the East River and go several more miles.  Then I have to take a bus, and walk, so I have been told, about ten minutes.....

....At the above mentioned hour, which city council members and bureaucrats call "rush hour," the people cluster waiting for very long trains, and in the midst of their tremendous screeching, one hears on the loudspeakers a warning, sometimes paternal and affectionate, sometimes alarmed, sometimes in an indifferent monotone, depending on the mood of whoever says it: "Watch the doors!  Watch the doors!  Watch the doors!"  Although more commonly, the warning is reduced to a contraction unintelligible to the new arrival: "Guochas!  Guochas!  Guochas!"

.....Here is our station.  A new triumph for the voyager, who struts securely until he emerges from underground, at the corner of a wide and deserted crosswalk, in which he will have to find his bus.  He takes a look at the note: "Q65A, next to a white building with sign that says Ridgewood Savings Bank."  Magnificent!  There it is in front of him.  The traveler crosses the deserted expanse like a newly decorated hero and enters the bus.

...He is surprised by his stop, which is marked a bit imprecisely on his directions.  Before or after Main Street?  The traveler gets off at Main Street and starts walking according to the map drawn by his friend.  The problem with all schematics and maps...is knowing which is right and which is left.  It´s as difficult as knowing which is North, South, etc.  Because the traveler has to say that he doubts the objective existence of these compass points.  At least, he has to confess that he doesn´t really understand them, or at the very least that he frequently reverses them by one hundred and eighty degrees.  This time, after half an hour walking as opposed to the promised ten minutes, he decides to ask someone where the university is.  The person he asks points to a point far in the distance.  But the traveler thinks he has been lucky.  He has only made a ninety degree mistake.

Carnicer's cheerful diary of his semester in New York happened to coincide with some interesting times, beginning in February 1968 with snowstorm and garbage strike and passing through the Columbia riots and massive anti-war demonstrations.  He had been living in Barcelona, and was originally from a small town in León, and his total shock at emerging from a milieu which was provincial even without the frozen-in-time world of Franco's dictatorship makes for amusing reading.  (It is genuinely difficult to tell how much he's joking when he writes that the pornographic magazines for sale in Times Square are a logical extension of 42nd Street library down the block because the five million volumes of the library call other books to them, so naturally bookstores abound.  And since Americans seem very preoccupied with sex...)  Of course, it's also funny to read his impressions of a neighborhood I know quite well, and his mentions of stores some of which survived into my childhood (and a few of which survive to this day).  In any case, while it's hardly of the same potential research interest as the books I didn't buy, it is a funny and humbling suggestion of what this blog might look like in fifty years time, and to a madrileño.  (In terms of my particular research interests, Carnicer is impressed by the strength of both American racism and its effects, and a bit unnerved by it.  He's cautiously and a bit patronizingly sympathetic to "los negros" in whom he includes a number of Spanish speakers, obviously unaware that the maid who cleaned his hotel room would probably have had serious thoughts about being described as "una negra dominicana" instead of  "una dominicana negra."  He's also as cheerfully sexist and objectifying of women as you would expect a man of his time and place to be, and unexpectedly virulently anti-Semitic which just goes to show that propaganda works.  Interestingly, a lot of his revulsion seems to be based in a fear which he would stoutly insist was based on rational concerns, which proves that those who invented the term Islamophobia were unexpectedly insightful in using the word "phobia."  Or as a tweet I saw recently put it: "the philosophy and history of American conservatism can be summed up as I'm a white man and I'm scared of everything."  Spanish conservatives, bless them, are scared of slightly fewer things, which makes them that much less obnoxious.)

So that was my afternoon at the feria de libro in Madrid, a calm and happy experience, which ended with bocatas de calamares.  And to paraphrase what a sign on a pescadería in Salamanca said about gambas (shrimp): Money doesn't buy happiness.  But it does buy calamares.  And I've never seen anyone crying while eating calamares.  Especially not on a Spring evening in Madrid.

Granted, the end of the evening got a bit loud, after Real Madrid's victory in the Champions League final, at which point fans began spilling on the streets chanting and waving scarves, and sympathetic cars started honking as they passed fellow fans.  The waiter at the restaurant by Atocha where we stopped to eat began to stack the outdoor chairs and tables around us and when he started to leave said in a friendly manner, "Oh, we're not closing, you're welcome to stay as long as you like.  But the manager likes us to have the tables out of the way in case they start throwing chairs.  We have another set of tables on the side street that's much more calm and we're leaving those out, so if you'd like to move you can.  But for now there shouldn't be anything.  They'll come up from los barrios (Arganzuela and the areas between Atocha and the river) and head up the Paseo del Prado to Cibeles, and in Cibeles they'll" (here he paused and eloquently mimed chugging a bottle of alcohol) "and then they'll come back here drunk after midnight, and that's when they throw chairs.  But we're just stacking them now por precaución.  You're welcome to stay as long as you like."  We all thanked him, but declined to stick around observe what happened when the fans came back from Cibeles drunk.  (The Spaniards and one Argentine in the group laughed at me when I referred to being in a European city during a big football victory as an "experiencia cultural" but I explained that there's really no equivalent in the US.  Even when the subway conductor announced 34th Street as "34th Street Madison Square Garden, Home of the New York Rangers" after the Rangers won the Stanley Cup one time people just laughed, and there was a spattering of good natured clapping, but it was mostly amusement at the conductor's enthusiasm rather than patriotic spirit.)  I took the last bus home before the buhos (night buses) started running (fortunately it was ten minutes late so I didn't miss it).  Everyone getting off the bus at Atocha was wearing a white Real Madrid jersey, and heading toward Cibeles.  Everyone getting on the bus was not wearing football gear, and had been sitting listening to the honking car horns with varying expressions of amusement, resignation, or disgust, but certainly not too much enthusiasm.  When I returned to the barrio there was no noise or honking or other stupidity.  One of the other nice things about Madrid: like New York, there are always significant numbers of people who are not caught up in whatever the celebration of the moment is.  The ability to be indifferent if you so desire (so well sketched by E.B. White in Here is New York) is the mark of a true city.

And ferias de libro are also nice.