Salon de l'Autre Livre - 2007 Report by Jeffry Larson
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WESSWeb > European Book Fairs > Paris Salon international de l'Autre Livre > 2007 Report by Jeffry Larson
- The fifth annual Salon de l’Autre Livre was held December 7-9, 2007, in a municipal cultural center in northeast Paris. Sponsored by the association L’autre LIVRE--a group of small, independent publishers dedicated to the defense and illustration of “biblio-diversité”--the Salon is also supported by the Ville de Paris and other governmental authorities, including the Centre National du Livre, and the Ministère de la Culture’s Direction Régionale des Affaires Culturelles.
- Free and open to the public, the Salon de l’Autre Livre is smaller and less heterogeneous than its Italian counterpart Più Libri Più Liberi, which meets the same weekend annually in Rome. This year the Salon attracted some three score Francophone publishers (listed on its web site); they are mostly what one could call artisanal. There were only a handful of publishers that I recognized, including Fédérop, Les Écrits des forges (all the way from Québec), HB, Beauchesne, and l’Oie Plate--the latter represented by old friend Roger Gaillard, author and publisher of invaluable guides to publishers, revues, and book fairs.
- Most of these publishing houses do not have printed catalogs or backlists, depending rather on web sites to publicize their publications. Some even boast of having neither catalog nor web site, evidently depending on face-to-face contact for sales: the one purchase (a translation of a book on Yale’s Skull and Bones Society) I made sur place, from a rather ideological publisher, was for cash and no receipt! Clearly this is a publishing niche that needs to develop their diffusion or marketing.
- Also associated with the Salon de l’Autre Livre were a poster-board exhibit and three evenings of readings and films on the occasion of the centenary of the author Roger Vailland, characterized in the program blurb as “drogué, alcoolique et stalinien”--a veritable feast of attractive features.
- Further south in the 11e arrondissement is an excellent couscous restaurant, le Café moderne, well worth the déplacement.
- -Jeffry Larson, Yale University Library, January 2008
WESSWeb > European Book Fairs > Paris Salon international de l'Autre Livre > 2007 Report by Jeffry Larson
