A little bit about the festival. What impressed me from the first minute on the site - how the oldest and largest literary festival in the world can look so chamber and cozy and leave the impression that you've been on another planet, so the organization is not comparable to anything already seen.
I don't have much experience of visiting big book events, and it's probably wrong to compare the festival, where everything revolves around informal communication between authors and readers, with exhibitions and fairs, where the gears of the book industry revolve, but I can't resist the parallels, because it was the brightest contrast between expectations and reality.
I remembered Moscow non/fiction, where simple transitions from stand to stand or from hall to hall look like passing a standard on a rough terrain, the official Minsk fair, which, if you want to get to the moment of arrival of "distinguished guests", you will not go without a passport. In the small park there was built a rather simple and informal festival town under the supervision of a statue on horseback with decking protecting the centuries-old lawn, with awnings, saving the guests of the festival from the endless rain, with cafes and shops, recreation areas, and most importantly - with separate halls for events with good noise isolation, having got inside of which you were a hundred kilometers from the homonome of the tourist city.
I don't know what was a horse and what was a cart. Maybe the work of the organizers, polished thirty years before the brilliance of the organizers, helped here, maybe it is easy for the organizers to work with the English admiration before the organization and queues. From the outside it looked like a well-coordinated work for the common good, an ideal literary anthill, perhaps.
Visitors came to the event strictly on tickets. Without delays. When buying tickets, everyone is warned that the performance for the authors - an emotionally difficult thing, so after the start of the meeting late sympathize, but not allowed into the hall under any pretext. Those who understand that they don't have time to hand in their tickets by contacting the ticket offices, and then the lucky ones who hoped to buy a ticket at the last minute will be able to get to their vacant seats. It is also convenient that when buying tickets the postal address of the visitor is recorded and any changes in time or place are reported.
Tents for events outside look the same white cubes, but inside each one is adapted to a specific format. There is no age division into theme areas or venues, depending on the objectives of the meeting. Where authors read excerpts from works of art, comfortable soft padded stools for guests and for the author. Where children's classes are held, there is baby furniture and a soft carpet. There are theatre armchairs where presentations are held, and all convenient equipment is on stage. Where the format is experimented with and the audience is surprised by near-literature events, guests sit at round tables and have access to a lively bar that works inside.
In anticipation of the next planned event, visitors plan between three bookstores and three cafes in the area. Of the shops, one is exclusively for children, one is exclusively for adults (there are also souvenirs with the emblems of the festival) and another is universal. Each shop has a space for shelves with books of authors, whose performance was or will be at the festival, and separate shelves with books of authors, who today have autograph sessions, indicating the time, which is very convenient.
The fact that the events were a success was proved by the queues growing up in one of the tents. Very friendly and polite queues. Waiters from nearby cafes could easily come up and offer to brighten up the wait with soft or hot drinks. Inside the tents, the coordinators had nothing against the cups, but kindly covered them with neprolivaikami lids, boxes of which they had at hand. The location with the name "Gene and Autographs" also hinted at the fact that literature and alcoholic beverages were linked by a warm friendship.
It was also striking that the festival had a free entrance, no frames and no metal detectors, police officers and dogs appeared at the festival only once, on the day when the former premier Gordon Brown and Brian May from The Queen performed. The look of the law enforcement officers was very benign, giving the children the opportunity to tremble in the ears of their furry colleague and to make up for the babies in wheelchairs themselves. And there was a feeling that it was not negligence on the part of the organizers, but just the opposite. Taxpayers pay a lot of money to make their security services work preventively and precisely, rather than showcasing the bags of passers-by inside out, just because someone thought of laying another wreath to the eternal flame.
The fact that it was forbidden to take pictures at the events caused special surprise. We didn't understand it at once, so we managed to make a couple of smuggled shots, and when we were warned that it was possible to take pictures only if we didn't take pictures of people, it came to us,