Introduction Magdalena Vodopija
The executive editor of this year’s catalogue told me the following: “Since we are doing this type of catalogue where authors write informally about themselves, so should you. Just please, make it brief.” Being the geek that I am, I read all of my earlier prefaces. In the early years of the Book Fair(y), at the end of the 90s and the beginning of 2000s, when there was still hope for the better days to come, the prefaces were full of enthusiasm and pathetically optimist. Later prefaces stayed comparably pathetic (full of pathos) which is, obviously, part of my nature, but there was scarcely any optimism to be found. It is interesting that almost all of them begin or end with a cataclysmic statement such as: “in the most difficult year of Croatian publishing”. I was writing them sincerely, knowing that those years weren’t promising, but it turns out that what I considered difficult at that time now looks as the “golden age of Croatian publishing”. Because, the year 2016 has happened, and in this already predefined transatlantic year of 2016, somewhere in late May, I came to realize that an abyss, a bottomless chasm in which the whole publishing scene could be thrown with a rash wave of a reckless hand actually existed. That’s why it didn’t even cross my mind to write that this is the most difficult year in the history of Croatian publishing, although it is. Furthermore, all the foundations and the main axes of this Book Fair(y) have already been mentioned in my previous prefaces: “A Creative Gang Gathered around the Renowned Bookstore Castropola”, “Decadent and Mediterranean Atmosphere of the Book Fair(y)”, “Dreamlike Book Fair where Books are Being Dreamt of”, “The Fair with an Alibi”, “Book Fair(y) Rooted in Rock Subculture and Film Festival Culture of Pula”, “The Fair of Authors and Audience”, “We are Kept Warm by our Mystical Togetherness” (anagram for the Book Fair(y) crew, authors, and the audience), “Small and Big Publishers Brought Together”... Those phrases are grounded in reality and they are not untrue, but they have been repeated so many times that I now find them worn out, hackneyed, banal... and they sound to me as a platitude. This year I can simply say this: “The Fair exists. The people of Pula love it!” For me, that is enough.
