Information Scotland

The Journal of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals in Scotland

December 2004 Volume 2 (6)

Endpiece

Festivals and fairs

Brian Osborne celebrates the rise of the literary festival in Scotland, even if it is becoming hard to keep with them all.

It's an odd thing. Reading; essentially a private and solitary pastime, just the reader and (hopefully) a good book; has become increasingly a public activity. The rise of reading groups is, I suppose, simply a sharing of this essentially private pleasure and an enhancement of it by joint exploration of a text. What is perhaps more remarkable is the rise of the literary festival where people gather to be talked to by authors.

This was driven home to me recently by contact with a wide range of festivals and the growing suspicion that soon there won't be enough weeks in the year to accommodate all of Scotland's book festivals.

August meant Edinburgh – talking once, chairing twice, and listening lots of times. The Society of Authors in Scotland contributes to the Edinburgh Book Festival financially and helps to programme the 'Writing Business' strand of talks – a series of practical presentations for aspiring writers. It is amazing, and either encouraging or worrying according to taste, quite how many people will pay to listen to somebody obscure (your present columnist) talking about how to write biography. The sight of a tent full of potential biographers or potential authors of children's books is a salutary reminder that the book has a lot of life left in it.

I know that I have mentioned this before – but really CILIPS must find some way of being involved at the Edinburgh International Book Festival. It's a splendid showcase to push the message that libraries are relevant, accessible, vital and available.

Perth & Kinross Libraries were kind enough to invite me to talk in Crieff as part of their 'The Word's Out' festival and I had an enjoyable evening talking about Macdonell of Glengarry to what I used to describe when I ran these things as "a small but committed audience".

Yes, dear reader, I must confess that I too was a festival organiser in my time. The Midlothian Libraries Festival may never had the scope of Edinburgh or the marketing of Perth & Kinross but it did try to bring the priceless gift of culture to Gorebridge and Danderhall – and sometimes it even succeeded; although I do recall evenings when Alan Reid and I rattled around in a room with two members of the general public trying somewhat unconvincingly to look like a crowd.

Visiting authors used to tell me that it wasn't the audience size that mattered but the interest they showed – which I always thought was a polite fiction invented to keep organisers happy. Since jumping the fence I now know it's actually true. Yes, we would all probably rather talk to 60 people rather than six, but when the six are so evidently interested in the subject it still works. Crieff proved a case in point – I was alarmed to see one of the audience not only clutching a copy of my book about Glengarry (The Last of the Chiefs, Argyll, £9.95, still available from your friendly library supplier), but he had various pages marked with bits of paper and gave the impression of knowing the book better than I did. In conversation afterwards it turned out that he was a possible descendant of the subject of the book and had not only read the book several times but had bought copies to give to his relatives – now that's the sort of reader I like!

With my Society of Authors in Scotland hat on I have been involved with the plans for two new festivals. Pitlochry Theatre has plans for a 'Winter Words' festival in late January 2005 – they see this as a way of getting people in to their building during part of the winter period. Glasgow City Council has extremely ambitious plans for a festival in February 2005 to be called, with a knowing glance at the local demotic, 'Aye Write!'.

On a much smaller scale the Society collaborated with Scottish Borders Council to run the Peebles Authors' Fair. What, I hear you cry, is an Authors' Fair? Well, I described it as the literary equivalent of a Farmers' Market. We got 20 authors to set up stall in Peebles Town Hall and sell their books direct to the Peebles public, bypassing the usual supply chain. Thanks to the co-operation and support of the Scottish Borders Council's staff – take a bow Ian Brown and Paul Taylor – and the enthusiasm of the authors we had a very successful event. A steady stream of local people came in to talk, buy books and apparently enjoy an unusual event, which will hopefully bear repetition, because the appetite for book fairs and festivals seems insatiable – but there are still only 52 weeks in a year!

Brian D Osborne
(brian@bdosborne.fsnet.co.uk)

Information Scotland Vol. 2 (6) December 2004

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Last updated: 7 February 2005