WATANI International
Second-hand books will be on sale at this year’s Alexandria International Book Fair, which opens its seventh round on 19 February and runs until 4 March.
Used books are being sold to make good books affordable to all readers, especially in consideration of the high cost of living that usually places the purchase of books as a low priority. It also aims at filling a growing demand for rare and antique books, particularly those printed in
Dr Khaled Azab, media manager department at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, expects the second hand books to include volumes in various fields of knowledge such as religion, culture, literature, poetry, and English books.
Memory of Egypt
The National Centre for Translation and the online archive Memory of Modern Egypt Digital Archive: http://modernegypt.bibalex.org launched by the Bibliotheca, are to be the features of this year’s book fair. A special pavilion will be allocated for publications of the Memory of Modern Egypt. Among these are books on Egyptian prominent figures of the 19th and 20th centuries, such as the national activist and minister Ali Pasha Ibrahim; vernacular poet Beiram al-Tunsi’ the Boutrosiya family, whose members served Egypt as ministers and activists, and among whom is former UN secretary-general Boutros Boutros-Ghali. Also among the publications are books on such institutions as the Egyptian Parliament and the press institutions of Akhbar al-Youm and Rose al-Youssef.
Translations aplenty
The translation centre’s part in the fair will be a number of its most recent titles, among them Aristotle’s Physics, Sophocles’s Electra, Descarte’s Discourse on Method, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Kan Yama Kan and Other Stories (Once Upon a Time), thought to be the first book to be translated into Arabic from Bosnian.
There is also the Guide for Guests of the Khedive’s Journey written by the French archaeologist Auguste Mariette and translated by Abbas Abu-Ghazala. The book was written for the benefit of Khedive Ismaïl’s guests on the occasion of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, among them some European royalty, and includes rare maps and illustrations of the Suez Canal and its opening ceremony.
The first Arabic translation of the Cambridge Encyclopedia for Literary Criticism, under the supervision of Marie Therese Abdel-Messih, will be in the fair, as well as Mohamed Khafaga’s translation of Herodotus on Egypt.
A quarter million visitors
In cooperation with the Lebanese House of Arts, the centre has published a translation of Culture and resistance, which cites opinions on the topic by the late Palestinian commentator and poet Edward Saïd, as well as an encyclopedia of Chinese literature in the 20th century, and We Will Never Be Apart translated from Tigrinya, an Eritrean language.
The Alexandria book fair has been gaining in significance as years go by, with a steadily growing number of Egyptian and Arab publishers taking part. Last year saw some 250,000 visitors to the fair.