Salon du livre contre F1

Admit it, it's still weird. When the STM strikes in June to protect the Formula 1 Canadian Grand Prix, we have the right to an exception.

But when the strike comes in November, we won't be able to get special treatment to protect the Montreal Book Fair?

Funny Society: Is vroom-vroom culture more important than culture itself? Is the machine more important than reading?

SLM vs STM

You've probably read that the possibility of a strike by Montreal Transport Society maintenance workers in November would harm the Montreal Book Fair, which runs from November 19 to 23. Moreover, 75% of exhibition visitors go there… by public transport. And that a very large part of the visitors are young people of school age.

This says a lot about a society that prioritizes entertainment activities (Formula 1, run by multimillionaire car makers) over gratifying activities (the book industry, run by authors who struggle to make a living with their pens).

I am the first to defend culture and access to it. At the same time, we also should not fall into exaggeration. And when I hear some people scream “disaster”, I want to tell them to calm down. We still have to look at the situation from the outside! A drop in exhibition attendance is also not synonymous with literary famine!

“The Montreal Book Fair is sometimes one of the few events of the year that brings young people into contact with books and reading,” fair general director Olivier Goujon told Radio-Canada.

The only time of year? Don't schools expose students to books, authors, and reading in French classes? Are there no school libraries? Are there no author visits to schools?

“This threatens the entire book ecosystem,” said Olivier Goujon. Press. Um, let's calm down…

I feel uncomfortable with the verbal exaggeration used by some speakers. We get the impression that we are reading an apocalypse script, as if there was an intellectual desert outside the UDF and that only five days a year the poor little young people of Quebec had access to books.

On the page

No one will say it publicly, but for many booksellers in Quebec, the Book Fair is unfair competition… subsidized by public funds. Last year, a bookseller, tired of the media attention the Montreal Book Fair received, emailed me: “So a book fair held five days a year would be more important than a network of public libraries or the 200 approved bookstores in Quebec that operate year-round to make books accessible to the entire population of Quebec?”

“Reading expands the soul,” said good old Voltaire. Well, I agree. But the Montreal Book Fair doesn't have a monopoly on reading. Tell that to all the bibliophiles who have never set foot there or died from it.