After a Sant Jordi touched and sunk by the pandemic and another half-normality and masked, this Saturday’s should be the return to normality. With the delayed desire to celebrate the party, even to overcome all the editions. It could not be. The good start it only allowed to weather with dignity the effect of the rain, the great enemy of the festival of the book and the rose.
The three successive hailstorms, the showers by surprise and the treacherous gales caused havoc in many places of bookstores and publishers. The peculiarity of the functioning of the book market (the booksellers buy the copies but in their calculations they count on the fact that they can return the unsold to distributors and publishers and recover the payment; but this does not happen with the damaged copies) means that the loss may fall disproportionately on those who have directly suffered the meteorological misfortunes, unless the sector as a whole comes up with some formula to balance the consequences. Not only this should be discussed from what happened this Saturday. The vagaries of the calendar had already advised on more than one occasion consider the festivity as a longer event in time, even a week away, although the logistical difficulties of sustaining the brutal effort involved in organizing the event had dissuaded them from doing so. The weather adds one more factor for reflection.
This Sant Jordi has also been in Barcelona the consolidation of the festival in a Passeig de Gràcia closed to traffic (where the professional sector has concentrated), a larger pedestrian area that also included a Rambla de Catalunya dedicated to the social entities that also participate in the festival and a decentralized Sant Jordi in various neighbourhoods. In the brief hours that the weather has allowed, the influx of public throughout this ephemeral ‘book walk’ has demonstrated the success of the option chosen by the Barcelona City Council and the Cambra del Llibre. The expansion of the spaces dedicated to the party in recent years (from the Rambles to the Rambla de Catalunya, which soon reached a state of unbearable and even questionable congestion from the security point of view) has been one of the symptoms of its growth. In the coming years there will continue to be opportunities to improve aspects such as the adjustment between the spaces for sales and signatures, or the possibility of reviewing the distribution of spaces in a more balanced way between Passeig de Gràcia, Rambla de Catalunya and the perpendicular streets.
But after Sant Jordi life goes on. And if what happened in recent months is taken as a reference, the ones that roared over Barcelona this Saturday they are not the only black clouds that appear on the horizon. During the two years of the pandemic, the book experienced a time of bonanza despite everything, as a form of cultural consumption that started with an advantage over those that suffered more severely from confinement and access restrictions and that even showed its ability to claim space for reflection in times of uncertainty and also as an alternative to fatigue before the screens. In recent months some of these competitive advantages have disappeared, sales have suffered and the decrease in purchasing power in a context of inflation can make the picture even worse. During the pandemic, the loyalty of the reading public to their trusted bookstores made them weather the storm. Let’s hope he does it again.