Bologna's Children's Book Fair—the biggest specialist event in publishing—takes place this year from April 4 through 7; repeating last year's successful test, it begins on a Wednesday and closes Saturday, thereby freeing part of the weekend for relaxing, seeing the sights or traveling home. Some 1,400 foreign exhibitors are booked, in addition to every children's imprint, large or small, on the Italian peninsula. Outlanders occupy 160,000 square feet of exhibit surface in four international exhibition halls, the natives an additional 75,000 square feet in an Italian compound. (Some of the world's biggest packagers of children's books happen to be Italian, among them Mondadori, Rizzoli-Fabbri, De Agostini and Piemme, which guarantees that the national pavilions will be very international too.)
Once again, Bologna's English-language contingent will be dominated by the English—that is, the British, who have booked over three times as much space as U.S. exhibitors. America gets its own back with a U.S. Media Pavilion, with individual stands and a collective for electronic publishers under the aegis of the Department of Commerce's Commercial Service.
In one of the facing English-speaking halls, a tastefully decorated and roomy Literary Agents Center, complete with message desk and snack bar, will once again play host to some of the world's leading rights specialists.
And because children's books are irresistible, but children don't really belong in a professional fair, fair management promises an even tighter screening process this year to limit attendance to those with business reasons for coming. (To show they aren't heartless, management has again set up a Spazio Ragazzi—a supervised day-care center in the Palazzo degli Affari, just outside the fair entrance on Piazza Costituzione.)
The 30,000-lire entrance fee (about $15), valid for the four-day run of the fair, is waived for visitors who register in advance (the bad news is that this offer expires March 5). Those who did make it in time are listed on the fair's Web site, www.BolognaFiere.it/Bookfair, though a password is required for access to the list. And, of course, a directory of exhibitors, with the Who's Who supplement, will be updated regularly via the Internet, with a CD-ROM catalogue and traditional print-on-glossy-paper catalogues at the fairgrounds.
Bologna's organizers, responsible for major trade fairs year-round on the same grounds, sponsor an annual Illustrators' Exhibition, strategically located at the entrance to the fair. Designed to make life easier for publishers, the accompanying catalogues—one each for fiction and nonfiction—contain reproductions of the work of exhibiting artists, along with their addresses. It's a no-nonsense exhibition, entrants screened in advance by a professional panel whose members this year include Howard Reeves, editor at Books for Young Readers at Abrams in New York. Reeves will participate in a discussion, "The Reasons Behind a Choice," at the Illustrator's Café, a forum sited within the Illustrators' Exhibition area, which will also be the site of meetings and workshops with authors, librarians and publishers on all four days of the fair.
Bologna is generous with prizes, and children's book publishers seem to like them too, since new categories and excuses for awards pop up every year. The awards ceremony will take place at the formal opening of the fair—a gala dinner the site of which hadn't been decided by press time (but may be one of the prestigious palazzi in the city's historic center).
Digital monitors will be in evidence here and there in all of the fair's 10 exhibition halls, but at this event nobody pretends that this is where the money is being made. Children's books still seem to need to be held and played with, or torn and nibbled at. Bologna fair management, nevertheless, provides generous facilities for the digital crowd, including a New Media Arcade in the main international hall and a slate of New Media Prizes awarded in partnership with Children's Software Revue. This year's fair will also be the occasion for announcing a new children's eBook award category, which will be presented during the next Bologna fair, a year down the road. This first Children's Award, for which projects published during the current year are eligible, will be judged by the U.S.-based International eBook Award Foundation and the jurors of Bologna's own New Media Prize. Speaking for the fair, new director Elena Pasoli told the press: "We look forward to recognizing those authors and publishers who are using the power of eBook technology for the benefit of children." And Alberto Vitale, chairman of the International eBook Award Foundation, in his own statement welcomed "this new association with the prestigious Bologna Children's Book Fair."
