Some 1,400 publishing houses and book distribution companies from France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Quebec occupied hundreds of stalls at the fair, as they do every year. This time, several Spanish-language publishing houses from Latin America also participated, sharing a large space in the exhibition hall.

The fair drew 120,000 people, showing its status as a major cultural event in this French-speaking state of Canada. Events were covered live on radio, and news reports were broadcast on television.

A special stand had been set up and a petition circulated during the fair by the Coalition in Favour of School Libraries, a grouping set up last year by writers, librarians, booksellers, publishers, and other book trade associations. The coalition is calling for increased financing for Quebec school libraries.

According to the Montreal daily La Presse, the Quebec Liberal Party government has budgeted to spend C$3.75 (C$1=US$0.77) per student this year for the purchase of new books, down from $5.29 five years ago, and just cancelled a $70 million project aimed at renovating the province’s school libraries.

These steps are unpopular in Quebec, whose French-speaking majority has long been on the receiving end of discrimination by the Canadian ruling class. In the 1930s, for example, the province’s illiteracy rate was twice that of neighboring English-speaking Ontario. Of the 27 public libraries in Quebec at the time, only nine were French-language, even though French speakers amounted to 80 percent of the province’s population.

Today the Quebec government spends $26 a year per person for public libraries, compared with $35 in Ontario and British Columbia. The Montreal library system has 2.5 books per person, compared with four in Vancouver and five in Toronto.

The Pathfinder team, which included volunteers from Boston and Toronto as well as Montreal, was kept busy by a steady stream of visitors to the booth. “You have damned nice books,” said one young Quebecois-Latina as she bought the Spanish-language editions of Malcolm X Talks to Young People, Che Guevara Talks to Young People, and Socialism and Man in Cuba, also by Che Guevara.

A few weeks before, she had met members of the Communist League and Young Socialists selling Pathfinder books, along with the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial, in a subway station in the eastern part of Montreal.

Pathfinder’s books and pamphlets on the Cuban Revolution were the most popular single category, accounting for more than a third of the 36 books sold, including five copies of Socialism and Man in Cuba. One woman said that she remembered the publisher from its participation in the Havana International Book Fair in Cuba, where she lived for four years. The total value of sales was C$671, helping to push the month’s sales for the Pathfinder bookstore in the city to more than $1,000—the best monthly result in some years.

Volunteers promoted Pathfinder’s French-language titles using a specially produced leaflet. In the five years since Pathfinder last participated, it has significantly expanded the range of these titles in its catalog. A number were displayed prominently at the front of the stand, including Capitalism’s World Disorder: Working-Class Politics at the Millennium by Jack Barnes, which attracted a lot of interest. Three copies—one each in Spanish, French, and English—were sold.

Team members also talked up the publisher’s web site—www.pathfinderpress.com—and sold several subscriptions to the Militant and Perspectiva Mundial. A number of young people signed up to receive the weekly mailings for the Militant Labor Forum program held at the Pathfinder bookstore. One young librarian working in the Côte-St-Luc neighborhood took advantage of Pathfinder’s presence to help prepare for Black History Month in February, buying books by Malcolm X, Nelson Mandela, Thomas Sankara, and Víctor Dreke.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home