Five keys to get to know the first post-pandemic Madrid Book Fair in depth

— This year, the star of the Madrid Book Fair will be a magnolia tree.

Between May 27 and June 12, the Association of Businessmen and Businesswomen of the Book Trade of Madrid, the very correct official name of the organizer of the event, will install 378 booths in the Retiro.

With two conditions: it cannot exceed 600 linear meters and it cannot touch the green areas.

This spring, the growth of a magnolia tree, a tree that cannot be pruned, has forced a hole to be left to respect its branches.

The decision well illustrates the tense coexistence between the survival of the park and that of a fair that in 2019 received —as far as an open space can be measured— 2,300,000 visits.

— The multiplication of small stamps is one of the great phenomena of the recent edition in Spain.

To make room for the newcomers, this time the rest have had to give up one meter per head.

In addition, in order to meet the environmental demands of the Madrid City Council - the Retiro has been a world heritage site since last June - there will be no public address system.

Screens, QR codes and even human beings will try to supply the emblematic announcer who reeled off the string of signatories: on weekends, the information rounds could last more than an hour.

Non stop.

Although there was always room for lyrics: in 2010, a bookseller used the microphone to propose to his girlfriend.

— The fair takes care of the park that houses it because it knows that its future depends on it.

Born in 1933 on Paseo de Recoletos, it moved to its current location in 1967. In 1979 it moved to Casa de Campo and was a resounding failure.

Lesson learned.

This course returns to May and to the open space after the suspension caused by the pandemic in 2020 and after the sanitary limitations imposed in 2021, which forced it to be held in September and to close its perimeter to control the flow of visits.

— In 2022, in addition, it is premiered.

For the first time in its history, it will be directed by a woman, the journalist Eva Orúe, who turns 60 on the opening day.

More coincidences: the new director has signed until 2024;

on that date, the Retreat will review the particular contract that it maintains with its massive tenant.

— This 81st edition does not have a guest country.

No one wanted to commit to traveling without knowing how the great protagonist of recent times would behave: the coronavirus.

Making a virtue of necessity, the new management has chosen travel as the backbone theme.

In all its variants: from exile to translation, passing, of course, through the narrative of walking and seeing.

The growing presence in Spain of Latin American writers, a meeting with other Spanish book fairs -Madrid does not have the exclusive-, an intergenerational colloquium on Harry Potter or a tribute to Almudena Grandes are part of a cultural program that has never been the strong point of the Madrid date.

— Last March, the book industry woke up from a dream.

The long lockdown of 2020 boosted readership rates and boosted sales as soon as bookstores reopened.

It is true that anthropological optimism means that in Spain even those who only read one book a year are included in the surveys, but for months literature once again shared the leisure time of Spaniards with television platforms, video games and social networks .

The return to the old normality —and, incidentally, to the bar terraces— coincided with the invasion of Ukraine and resulted in inflation of 9.8%, the highest since 1985. Caution returned to consumption and Returns from bookstores led publishers to review the plans they had already revised when another crisis appeared in the fall: that of paper.

The strike of the Finnish cellulose workers and the famine of the war have triggered the price of a raw material whose scarcity is already beginning to be noticed: print runs are adjusted, less is reprinted and the hard cover is dispensed with as much as possible.

Large groups suffer less because they buy directly from the factory.

Small labels see how the cost of a copy can increase by up to 5%.

For now, they are reluctant to pass on that rise to the public.

We don't know for how long.

Small labels see how the cost of a copy can increase by up to 5%.

For now, they are reluctant to pass on that rise to the public.

We don't know for how long.

Small labels see how the cost of a copy can increase by up to 5%.

For now, they are reluctant to pass on that rise to the public.

We don't know for how long.

— Only the Prado Museum moves as many people at the end of the year as the Book Fair.

For Madrid it is, at a massive level, a mixture of Fallas, Sevillian April and Sanfermines.

The attraction is some peculiar paper objects —digital is still looking for a place— and those who write them.

Whether or not they are related to culture.

In a city where at seven in the evening, as the classic said, you either give a lecture or they give it to you, the Retreat has little to offer on that side.

It neither can nor wants to be professional like Frankfurt or cultural like Guadalajara (Mexico), its impossible terms of comparison.

It seeks to stay as it is.

As long as the park holds out, people continue to miss Carmen Martín Gaite —who she adored these days— and some clueless reader approaches Javier Cercas to comment with him

or Carlos Zanón to dedicate a novel by Carlos Ruiz Zafón to him.

The last thing he wants is to die of success.