Book Fair Termed Huge Success

The eighth Jerusalem International Book Fair, which was held here at the Binyanei Ha’ooma from April 26 to May 2, was the biggest and most impressive since the biennial event was started. It was attended by some 100,000 visitors, compared to 90,000 two years ago. It featured 1000 exhibits from 1023 publishers in 43 countries displaying 50,000 books. On the average, this year’s Book Fair was about 40 percent larger than any previous one.

According to Shlomo Erel, director of the Export Institute’s Book and Printing Center, the Fair was “quite successful” from a business point of view. But it is clearly more than a business event. The tens of thousands of people who jammed the convention center each day testified to the Book Fair’s universal cultural appeal.

During the official opening ceremonies, President Ephraim Katzir awarded the Jerusalem Prize to the Mexican poet, Octavio Paz. The prize is conferred biennially by the Jerusalem Municipality on the writer whose work expresses “the freedom of the individual in society.”

PAZ:’… I WOULD BE A ZIONIST’

Paz told a press conference that when Mexico voted in the United Nations to equate Zionism with racism “I wrote an article proving that they had made an enormous moral and political mistake. Zionism is a historic and political expression of auto-emancipation; it is not nationalistic in the narrow sense of that term. Since the Holocaust, if I were a Jew I would be a Zionist.”

The Fair’s agenda included a session of the “first international conference of scientific editors,” an international meeting of the printing and publishing committee of the “Jerusalem Economic Conference” on the subject of Jerusalem, the Holy Land and the Bible in the context of religious and general publishing and a luncheon hosted by Minister of Commerce and Industry Haim Barlev. Publishers participating in the Fair also breakfasted with Jerusalem’s Mayor Teddy Kollek. and attended an informal discussion with former Foreign Minister Abba Eban.

As at previous Jerusalem book fairs, the Israel Museum sponsored the International Art Book Prize. The five books, out of 200 entered in the competition, which were cited for excellence were: “Drawing, a Creative Process,” designed by Kurt Wirth and published by ABC Verlag, Zurich (a gold medal); “Glad Konst,” designed by Olle Eksell of Sweden (a silver medal); “La Marca Magica” by Antonio Grass of Colombia (a silver medal); “Anti-Object Art” by Lawrence Levy of Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois; and “Zeichensprache Der Architektur” by Rolf Pariett, Zurich.

Some of the biggest and most prestigious names in publishing in the United States and other countries were represented at the Book Fair. American participants included Bantam Books, Time-Life Books, New American Library, Yale University Press, Harvard University Press, Grosset and Dunlap and William Morrow. (By Uzi Benziman)