Kyiv Argument
One can consider that the results of the Second Kyiv Book Market were unsold books. Only those who occasionally dropped in to the National Physical Culture University had a chance to find out that an outstanding event, a book market, was going on in Kyiv, and there were few such people.
Of course, many Ukrainian publishers (especially not Kyiv-based) did not even assign the task of selling books immediately at this market. For instance, the Kharkiv-based Folio publishing house brought to the Kyiv exhibit copies of new books, planning to deal with wholesale customers only. At the same time, the smaller Ukrainian publishing houses still counted on “common” customers which due to lack of publicity never appeared at the market.
The book market was not only an opportunity to buy a book but also to talk directly to the publisher’s editors and often also to the author presenting his or her new book, encouraging those customers who like to have a book with an autograph in their libraries. Nevertheless, the only publishing house presenting its authors at the Kyiv forum was Kyiv based Fakt. Well-known mathematician and author of textbooks and brilliant popular mathematics books Isaak Kushnir presented his new work, The Returning of the Lost Geometry (a serious claim for a math bestseller), and Oksana Zabuzhko greeted her fans with a new book Fairy Tale of a Guelder Rose Reed Pipe.
The market press release promised “meetings with outstanding politicians, diplomats, scholars, writers, representatives of science, education and the arts.” And it seems that there is no formal excuse to blame the organizers of the market’s cultural program that they failed to carry out their promises, since Mykola Zhulynsky and Ivan Drach, who definitely are among the “outstanding politicians, diplomats, scientists, writers, representatives of science, education, and arts,” really appeared at the market opening. So, as they say, it is not quantity that matters. Then what does? What matters for the Kyiv Book Market? Here is what matters: getting closer to official authorities. In a state where any normal way of running business is blocked on the legislative level (incidentally, the tax code bill currently being discussed by Verkhovna Rada doesn’t provide any privileges for Ukrainian book publishing), everything is decided by individual state representatives. Thus the most interesting number upon which the organizers of Kyiv Book Market cultural program set their hopes for success was the flattering dancing of some complaisant publishers around a vice premier.
