FIL 2015, Guadalajara, Mexico

In a previous article it's mentioned how Mexico has established policies and programs to overcome its low levels of readership. One of those initiatives is the Feria Internacional del Libro (FIL), or International Book Fair in English, a nine-day exhibit scheduled yearly at the end of November. Since 1993, the FIL has facilitated a link between authors, publishing houses and readers, placing books at the center of many cultural happenings that seek to attract the attention of locals as well as visitors, and has been consolidated as the most ambitious fair for the publishing industry in Spanish language after the Buenos Aires event of the same name. It’s estimated that the 2014 edition was visited by 760,000 people, and the number is expected to grow this year.

Guadalajara FIL’s scope is not limited to Hispanic culture, as yearly editions have had as guests other language speaking countries or “cultural zones”, such as Canada, Germany, Italy, Brazil, the United States, Israel and the United Kingdom (guest of 2015), promoting their culture with an emphasis on literature, but not limited to it. The U.K.’s cultural offerings include the island’s prestigious education services, in coordination with its permanent representation in Mexico, The British Council; as well as visual arts exhibits, cinema presentations, theater and other performance spectacles, such as jazz and folk concerts.

The U.K.’s publishing industry is pushing a challenging program at the FIL this year, with the inclusion of comics and the graphic novel in discussion panels. British storyteller Karrie Fransman is one of the guests whose narrative about a Middle-Eastern refugee across Europe will bring forward an expected discussion about this social phenomena that’s rapidly changing the course of History and Geopolitics. Fransman’s comics are narrated with great empathy from the point of view of a teenager who not only is forced to leave his homeland, but also encounters enormous difficulties in his way through Europe.

This positions comics as a privileged and necessary platform for slow-paced reflection and solidarity, in opposition to the celerity and almost sensationalist logic of news outlets in electronic media. She will be talking with one of Mexico’s renowned comics author, Bernardo Fernández, “BEF”, in one of the most exciting panels of the FIL, as well as offering a workshop on comics-making for youngsters aged 13-18, and a collaborative drawing experiment (a “slam”) with artists Ed Vere, Valeria Gallo and Abril Castillo.

The U.K.’s focus on literature has other equally exciting panels of debate that will range from the intersection between literature and popular culture, to the current perspectives on race, class and sexuality that enrich the interpretation of literature. Philippa Gregory, who’s been called “the queen of British historical fiction”, and whose novels have been adapted to very popular television shows such as The Tudors or The Wise Woman. A Respectable Trade, will be having a conversation with Welsh author Joseph Dunthorne and Mexican writer Guadalupe Nettel on the subject of love, and she’ll be talking about History and Fiction in a dedicated panel with writers Joanne Harris and Cortina Butler.

Iain Sinclair will be discussing the centrality of London in his work, while internationally acclaimed author Irvine Welsh will share a panel –and maybe a pint– with the famously irreverent writer and publisher Guillermo Fadanelli, in what promises to gather lots of attention from the public. Identity issues and literature are scheduled to be discussed by Brits Joanne Harris, Ned Beauman, Sunjeev Sahota and Nick Barley. It will be interesting to see how British authors have received well-established subgenres from the Latin American tradition, specifically the Magic Realism, which will be pondered in a panel conducted by Mexican writer Alberto Chimal.

The conversation about literature in all its forms, from the traditional printed book to its relation with videogames, poetry as performance and the practice of blogging, will seal this year’s FIL dedicated to the United Kingdom. There’s more to come, though:

Musical activities keep gaining more space at the FIL. Many genres are covered: Aurora chamber Orchestra will play their versions of English icon John Lennon; Indie rock band Spector, named after the legendary music producer from the 60s Phil Spector, is scheduled for a concert, as well as three groups of contemporary Scottish, Northern Irish and Welsh folk: bands Sam Lee & Jon Whitten, Jarlath Henderson & Hamish Napier, and Peatbog Faeries. The popular Cinematic Orchestra will be one of the last acts, playing their classics and new material. The music representation will also include a jazz band formed in England by Gary Crosby. Jazz Jamaica is one of Britain’s best fusions of Caribbean rhythms.

The Cinema section presents 11 films of various genres, most of them released in 2014 or this year, such as Carol Morley’s The Falling or the upbeat documentary Pride by Matthew Warchus. These recent pictures will be presented next to two classics: John Baptist Lucius Noel’s Epic of Everest (1924) and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Lodger (1927), one of his early silent films that has been digitally restored by the British Film Institute and will be accompanied by live music, in the second presentation of this cinematic jewel, after its 2014 presentation in Mexico City.

The visual arts have a very diverse representation, with polemic artist David Shrigley showing his sardonic Lose Your Mind exhibition, consisting of sculptures, prints, drawings, oils and video-animation. George Blacklock and Gary Oldman’s duo Slipping Glimpsers have a multimedia project that’s gathered plenty of attention in the U.K.

Fashion designer Amanda Watkins will present her work with local children of Mexico’s Monterrey city “Cholombianos”, and finally Words and Pictures is a British Council collection that includes work by David Hockney. All these cultural activities are followed by discussion panels that seek to link science and literature, as well as talks by personalities who’ve had important academic experiences in the island, such as the ex rector of the National Autonomous University of Mexico, José Narro.

To complete FIL 2015, there are more than 70 activities that include book presentations and signings, colloquia, prizes, tributes and mentions, panels on politics, sciences, comics, political cartoons, elections, journalism, forums for book publishers, digital editions workshops and a special section for children and youngsters.

Particular authors and Latin American countries will have their own small sections-panels, such as the Julio Cortázar chair, or the Seamus Heaney and the Salvador Elizondo roundtables. Small South American country Uruguay always has a significant presence and on this occasion, a panel will be set up to discuss new authors and tendencies in what is one of the region’s richest literary countries. Quebec has an important representation as well: there are three panels dedicated to new tendencies in dramaturgy, fiction and poetry, presented by Larry Tremblay, Louise Desjardins and Mathieu Blais.

Every year the FIL offers its prize in Romance Languages to a distinguished author. Spaniard Enrique Vila-Matas will receive the honor in a discussion panel composed by academic Juan Antonio Masoliver, writers Cristina Fernández Cubas, Eduardo Lago, Ignacio Vidal-Folch, Guadalupe Nettel and journalist Josep Massot, who will be talking about Matas’ four decades of continuous activities in literature.

For an event of this magnitude, the FIL has managed to find a balance between its main events and the inclusion of small and independent publishing houses and authors, as well as academic presentations that are rarely heard of by large audiences. 

Archived site: 

https://web.archive.org/web/20180719235204/https://www.bookwitty.com/text/fil-2015-guadalajara-mexico/565d332dacd0d00de4a9aae9

https://www.bookwitty.com/text/fil-2015-guadalajara-mexico/565d332dacd0d00de4a9aae9

I’d rather jump off a sixth floor: the case of Sexto Piso, independent publisher

I’d rather jump off a sixth floor: the case of Sexto Piso, independent publisher

It’s no secret Mexico has a problem with its reading habits: UNESCO has recently (2012) shown the average Mexican reads less than three books per year, one of the lowest numbers in developing nations. These poor results have persisted for decades, despite official initiatives to promote this activity in all sectors of society. So how exactly do you plan to open a publishing house under these conditions?

The case of Sexto Piso is a rarity: around 2003, a group of Political Science students in the country’s largest public university –National Autonomous University of Mexico, with its campus in the south of Mexico City– decided to translate and publish their mentor and friend Roberto Calasso, an Italian author and publisher with plenty of experience in his country and other European countries. Calasso not only offered his expertise in matters such as rights acquisitions, but gave them exclusive rights to some of his titles.

Sexto Piso’s founders didn’t have marketing studies or strict business plans when they set up the company. Despite its logo, which shows a man jumping off a sixth floor (a “sexto piso”), becoming publishers wasn’t exactly a leap of faith: they cultivated a selection of mostly foreign and obscure authors and topics, hired more than competent translators and printed high quality editions, catering to the knowledge and interest of a very specific sector: the highly educated middle class of the capital.

Surprisingly, Sexto Piso’s main obstacle wasn’t a low number of readers, disinterest in their obscure or rescued classics, or difficulties in buying rights: they had to fight very hard to get a space in bookstores that were very reluctant to exhibit other titles than their proved formulas. The publishers worked hard for their spaces and began a fast rhythm of editing carefully selected and diverse materials, from Political Science to Philosophy and Science Fiction. Some of their first publications were Morris Berman’s The Twilight of American Culture (“El crepúsculo de la cultura americana”), novels by the somewhat obscure Stanislav Lem and Milorad Pavic, and titles of classic writers that hadn’t been translated to Spanish, such as David Hume, Etienne de La Boétie or George Orwell.

What all these heterogeneous books had in common was their singularity and their dedicated design, the discreet but recognizable covers with their funny falling man logo, a clean typography and acid-free paper that was a luxury in those years, but has become a standard in many local artisanal publishing practices. Within a year, Sexto Piso won the 2004 International Young Publisher of the Year Award, opened an office in Spain (the main market for Spanish language literature) and has become a shift in the paradigm of how and what to publish in one of the most difficult markets for literature, such as Mexico.

The editorial house, now with more than 300 titles divided in six collections ("classics", "narrative", "essay", "actualities", "illustrated" and "kids"),  bases its success in the taste of its board members, exercised almost as a curation of a work of art in itself: a solid, perfect catalog that’s been possible against the odds. More than 10 years since its foundation and without having become massive, Sexto Piso has grown steadily in Mexico despite the low levels of readership that all surveys show, and in a permanently stagnant economy.   

Another component of their growth is the opening of a section dedicated to illustrated books and graphic novels, a collection called “Sexto Piso ilustrado” (“Sexto Piso illustrated”). One of the first titles and on-going projects is the 2006  adaptation of Marcel Proust’s In Search Of Lost Time volume I, by French comics artist Stéphane Heuet, and translated to Spanish by Conrado Tostado. Heuet’s adaptation of the French classic took many years to complete and proved how a visual adaptation to the form of comics is far from a substitution of the written text, but a rich and demanding narrative with its own merits.

The illustrated collection of the editorial house is not only following the guidelines of some of the finest art and comics publishing houses, such as Fantagraphics or Drawn and Quarterly, but competing with them in the growing market of Spanish-speaking readers in the United States, acquiring rights and signing authors such as Peter Kuper, whose “Diario de Oaxaca” was an astonishing drawn and written diary that offered a personal and intimate insight into one of Mexico’s most brutal political confrontations of recent years, the civil protest led by teachers in the state of Oaxaca, and the repression that followed in 2006.

Sexto Piso’s method of work wasn’t new; Spain’s Anagrama and Siruela, or  Argentina’s Amorrortu, among others, have been following an approach of singular titles with attention to design and a particular audience in mind for many years, and with great results. But it’s Sexto Piso’s merit to have defied the very real obstacles of the Mexican editorial industry and perhaps even the commonplace of "a disinterested audience that doesn't read", who, in response, maintains alive and in prosperity one of the country’s most important independent cultural projects.

As part of the third edition of "Celebrating Mexico", a program that shows two-minute short films of various successful Mexican personalities from diverse areas (arts, science, entertainment, gastronomy, sports…), Latin American Discovery Channel and its various networks are presenting, from September 2015 to September 2016, a video-clip of Eduardo Rabasa and Felipe Rosete, two of the founding editors, talking of their company's place is Mexico's editorial landscape and the role of editing and writing, as they show what a common day is like in the workshop press and in their offices. They can be watched during the commercial breaks of the networks regular schedule.

Local TV show Central Once recorded a program centered on the company's main collections, as well as an interview with Eduardo Rabasa. Their great collection of covers and high quality pressings can be seen next to shots of graphic novelists working on their desks. It's on Youtube, in Spanish.  

http://www.bookwitty.com/text/565824aeacd0d03c098a1cc0