GUADALAJARA — Rosa Maria Aburto and five friends sprawled on the cold marble floor of the Expo Guadalajara convention center and picked over their treasure. They had traveled hundreds of miles from Baja California to the International Book Fair here and now, just hours after the doors had opened, they had already filled a half-dozen bags with books.
Exhausted after several trips around the mammoth hall, they were nonetheless calling their visit an unqualified success.
"I love it! Es lo maximo," Aburto said of the fair. "In Mexico, you can't get any better than that."
Apparently a lot of people share that opinion because the annual fair--which ended its nine-day run Sunday--has in just a decade grown into one of the largest and most important literary events in Latin America. And it's also a big reason why, despite political turmoil and financial crisis throughout the region, publishers are doing a robust business in Latin America.
The fair has become so important that many publishers delay the release of new titles until Guadalajara, where--with 500 journalists and more than 8,000 industry types in attendance--new books are guaranteed international exposure.
In addition, there were signings by authors such as Carlos Fuentes and Isabel Allende, more than 380 panel discussions, forums and conferences on book-related topics, and two prestigious literary awards were presented.
That's the kind of clout Raul Padilla Lopez, former rector of the University of Guadalajara, was after when he first hit on the idea of establishing a book fair in Mexico's second-largest city. His plans were ambitious from the start, but with the Mexican publishing industry streaking toward disaster, nothing less would do.
In the beginning, "the book fair had two fundamental purposes," said Padilla, 41. "One was to stimulate the book industry in Mexico and Latin America. At the same time, we were interested in putting on a cultural show for our region and our country."
But stimulating interest in books in Mexico struck even publishers as a quixotic quest. Just half the nation's 95 million people have more than a grade-school education, and even those who read have a hard time finding books, because there are fewer than 500 bookstores in the country.
"The idea of the fair was regarded with enormous skepticism by the Mexican publishing industry," remembered Francisco Trillas, who was then president of the country's book publishers association. "The reactions were that it was a folly."
