An industry overview
The Seventh Euro-Arab Book Fair provided a professional rendez-vous for European and Arab publishers, while giving the European public a window onto publishing in the Arab world, reports David Tresilian from Paris
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Dar Al-Fata Al-Arabi's children's books are noted for their creative illustrations, some of which are on display at the Euro-Arab book fair; Cockwise from top are illustrations by Laila Al-Shawwa, Helmi El-Touni, Ihab Shaker and Nabil Tag
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Since its inception in 1990 the Paris Euro-Arab Book Fair, held bi-annually at the Institut du Monde Arabe, has established itself as an important rendez-vous for those working in the European and Arab publishing industries, as well as for a general public eager to catch up on publishing in the Arab world and on cooperation between Arab and European publishers.
This year's fair, the seventh, running from 10 to 15 June and with Algeria as its guest of honour, boasted the usual mix of seminars, lectures, exhibitions and meetings on its margins, some of them reserved for industry professionals, others open to the general public, with 243 publishers represented, 107 European and 136 Arab. European publishers from France, Germany, the United Kingdom and other countries having Arab lists, whether of books about the Arab world or of translations from the Arabic, were present at the fair, as were Arab publishers from 17 countries.
Algeria, as guest of honour at the fair and already the subject of events across France as part of the 2003 Year of Algeria in France, was given special attention, with round-table debates being organised on Algerian poetry and on the new generation of Algerian writers, as well as on the Algerian writer Mohamed Dib, who died recently.
From Egypt, national publishing houses such as Al- Ahram, the General Egyptian Book Organisation and Al-Hilal had stands at the fair, as had independents including Dar Al- Mustaqbal Al-Arabi, Dar Al- Sharqiyyat and Al-Shuruk. Algeria was represented by 24 publishers producing books in Arabic and in French, while Lebanon -- with Egypt traditionally the centre of Arab publishing -- had sent 28 publishers to the fair. There were five Palestinian publishers represented, and a further selection from the Maghreb countries and from the Gulf.
Mrs Suzanne Mubarak, who has played an important role in promoting reading among children in Egypt, gave a well- attended lecture at the fair entitled "Reading and encouraging reading in Egypt and the Arab World".
Of the publishers represented at the fair France, perhaps inevitably, had the strongest presence, with stands representing 61 French publishers. These included well-known larger French publishers with Arab lists, such as Gallimard, Seuil, Hachette and Presses universitaires de France, as well as smaller houses specialising in Arab material, such as Actes Sud, or general publishers that have developed lists of historical and reference material on the Arab world, such as La Découverte and L'Harmattan. Art book publishers Maisonneuve et Larose and Payot et Rivages also had stands.
Of the other European countries represented, it was a matter of regret that British publishers had made so little effort to be present at the Euro- Arab Book Fair, though well-known London independents having substantial Arab lists such as Al- Saqi and Zed Books had put together comprehensive stands.
The aim of this year's fair, as of the bi-annual series of which it forms a part, was, as Nasser El- Ansari, director of the Institut du Monde Arabe, put it in the fair's catalogue, "to give an idea of publishing in the Arab world in its entirety... and to facilitate the public's access to works published on the Arab world in the major European languages". The catalogue, listing all the participating publishers and giving listings of recent titles published on the Arab world in European languages and by Arab publishers in Arabic, English and French, will be a useful resource for anyone seeking an overview of the landscape of Arab publishing.
Two essays included in the catalogue, by Frank Mermier of the Institut Français du Proche-Orient in Beirut and Yves Gonzales-Quijano of the same institution in Damascus, gave background on some features of that landscape. For Mermier Arab publishing, having developed strongly in the decades immediately following the independence of Arab countries from colonial rule, was now characterised by "strong heterogeneity and by the existence of a multiplicity of small companies".
Weak purchasing power in the most populous Arab countries, such as Egypt, Iraq, Morocco, Algeria and Sudan, together with poor distribution and few bookshops, had led to a sense of crisis in Arab publishing, Mermier argued, while political tensions in Iraq, Algeria and Sudan had also notably weakened the publishing industry, leading to a fall in the number of translations and of literary works.
While 12,196 titles were officially registered in Egypt in 2002, only 2,484 were registered in Syria, and while the Egyptian publishing industry "has been strongly marked by state involvement, its market being mainly domestic and its production standards comparatively low" the Lebanese industry "is entirely private sector and is for the most part directed at foreign markets".
Recent years have seen the development of significant publishing industries outside the Cairo-Beirut axis, Mermier says. For Gonzales-Quijano, change has come about as a result of the withdrawal of the state, in some countries in the Arab world, from the kind of state-supported publishing programmes that marked the post- independence decades, leading to "the modernisation of the cultural sector, particularly in its editorial policies, and to the progressive conquest of that sector by the leisure and consumption industries".
In this writer's view, the challenges facing Arab publishing have to do with "the cleaning up of a market undermined by the absence of regulation (of which piracy is only one aspect), the modernisation of a profession that has not yet left the 'bookstore' for the publishing industry, and above all the breaking of the constraints of the different national markets in favour of the constitution of a real regional area in which the free circulation of publications will allow the development of initiatives that are both more ambitious and less dependent, whether on public support or on the law of supply and demand."
Exhibitions on Arab cartoon strips, La BD dans le monde arabe, and on children's book illustration complemented this year's fair, there being an additional exhibition of caricatures of Arab writers by the Syrian- Lebanese cartoonist Hassan Idelbi.
Cartoon strips in Europe tend to have either a Franco-Belgian, in the shape of Tintin or Asterix, or US provenance, in the shape of the characters produced by DC Comics, including Superman. In the Arab world, as this exhibition revealed, though US comic-book characters began appearing in Arabic versions from the 1960s on, cartoon strips have also served as vehicles for national content, with publications such as Sindbad, published in Egypt in the years after 1957, Samir (Egypt, from 1955), Al- Karaoun (Egypt, from 1964), as well as Usamah (Syria), Irfane (Tunisia) and Majallati (Iraq) in the 1960s and 1970s, helping to give cartoon form to national and traditional characters and to draw new ones on traditional models.
From Algeria the characters of Bouzid and of M'Quidech, both developed by Algerian cartoonist Slim (Menouar Merebtene), were given prominence in the exhibition, as was the political role played by the cartoon strip in this part of the Maghreb, perhaps as a result of French influence. In France cartoon strips have long been given an intellectual respectability that they have sometimes been denied elsewhere.
A strong Egyptian showing marked the exhibition on Arab children's book illustration, with original work and illustrated books on display from Mohamed Abla, Nabil Tag and Mohieddin El-Labbad, the latter two illustrators being strongly associated with the Cairo/Beirut publisher Dar Al-Fata Al-Arabi, which has produced some of the best children's books in Arabic. There were also strong showings from the Sudan and the Maghreb.
As the notes accompanying this exhibition explained, not all the artists on display specialise in children's book illustration. However, many do, with some, such as El-Labbad, whose work for Al- Karaoun was produced in collaboration with writer No'man Ashour, having work also featured in the cartoon-strip exhibition. Born in Cairo in 1940, El- Abbad draws on traditional drawing styles and folklore in his illustrations in a search for a national style, and has produced work that has renovated the design of Arabic children's books in much the same way as children's books were renovated in Europe from the 1960s on.
7ème Salon euro-arabe du Livre, Institut du monde arabe, Paris, 10 to 15 June; La BD dans le monde arabe, 10 to 29 June; Illustrateurs arabes de livres pour enfants, 13 June to 17 August.
