Foreigners a footnote for the book fair
- Source: Global Times
- [09:07 August 18 2010]
- Comments
Visitors check out books at the 2010 Shanghai Book Fair. Photo: CFP
By Nick Muzyczka
The 2010 Shanghai Book Fair, which ended Tuesday, though entirely impressive in terms of its scale and organization, had relatively little to offer the city's expat community. Almost every inch of the voluminous (and very nicely decked out) Shanghai Exhibition Hall was utilized in the fair, though the vast majority of the books, magazines, journals and digital equipment were Chinese-language only.
There were, however, more options for those searching for English-language books than are usually available in the city's foreign language bookstores. The usual slew of trashy pop novels, "classic" classics, detective fiction and language textbooks were certainly prominent, though in between the multiple editions of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie compendia there were a number of interesting and more rarely seen works.
Keen-eyed browsers may have come across copies of Goethe's The Sorrows of Poor Werther, a classic of German romanticism, a collection of Ibsen plays or some philosophical musings by Theodore Adorno.
The Global Times' shopping bag included purchases of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich by Alexander Solzhenitsyn (20 yuan ($2.95), Notes from the Undergound by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (18 yuan), Main Street by Sinclair Lewis (18 yuan), and Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov (70 yuan).
Most impressive
By far the most impressive foreign-language section was the expansive range of architecture, design and landscaping books, topics that seemed to have been singled out by the organizers. There were many obscure works, such as an English-German art book edited by Heike Munde detailing the historical forgery work of the Polish artist Robert Kusmirowski (1,100 yuan).
Other classic "art" books were there for the taking, including 1000 Pin-up Girls (100 yuan), a collection of pictures of the 1950s models who appeared in Robert Harrison's pulp girlie titles (Beauty Parade, Eyeful, Titter).
