12 Nov '14

Boekenbeurs closes good year with 150,000 visitors

Summary

Comics, cookbooks and crime thrillers were top sellers at this year’s Boekenbeurs in Antwerp, Flanders’ largest book fair

 

Strips in the spotlight

Antwerp’s Boekenbeurs (Book Fair) closes to the public today, following a successful 78th edition that attracted 154,000 visitors, about the same number as last year. The most successful day was Monday, with 20,00 visitors, thanks to the long weekend.

The Boekenbeurs is Flanders’ largest book fair and one of the region’s annual cultural highlights. “It wasn’t exactly a top edition,” Boekenbeurs director André Vandorpe told VRT radio. “Probably because most of the fair fell outside the autumn school holiday. Still, people are happy with the turnout, including the stand-holders.”

Among the highlights this year was the emphasis on cartoon strips; one in 10 of the books sold in Flanders is a comic strip, and strip artists and authors were special guests at the fair. The listeners to Radio 1 were invited to vote for the best Flemish strip of all time, an honour that went to Album 26 of the Kiekeboes series by Robert Merhottein, who publishes under the name of Merho.

“I had never expected to leave my boyhood idols Willy Vandersteen, Jef Nys and Hergé behind me,” said Merho. “Without them, it never would have occurred to me to make strips. I think this result says more about the popularity at this moment of the Kiekeboes series, rather than anything about the best Belgian strip.”

As in previous years, most attention went to cookbook writers. The recipe collection Mijn 200 klassiekers (My 200 Classics) by TV chef Jeroen Meus was the festival’s best seller in non-fiction, while the latest crime thriller by Pieter Aspe, Zonder voorschrift (Without a Prescription) topped the charts for fiction.

Photo by Wim Hendrix/Het Nieuwsblad

Comics, cookbooks and crime thrillers were top sellers at this year’s Boekenbeurs in Antwerp, Flanders’ largest book fair.

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Boekenbeurs

Boekenbeurs is the biggest book fair in the Low Countries. Organised at Antwerp Expo every year in November, it is considered the public literary event of the year in Flanders.
Beginnings - The Boekenbeurs was first organised in the 1930s by the reading promotion group VBVB (which later became Boek.be), which wanted to push Flemish books to educate people about the region’s local culture and to put its literature on the map.
Programme - The fair typically houses some 90 booths from publishers and bookshops, in addition to staging many side events like competitions, meet-and-greets and cookery demonstrations. About 800 authors are typically on hand to sign books and be interviewed.
Sideshow - In recent years, Boekenbeurs organisers have famously included celebrity figures like reality show star Astrid Bryan and ex-art fraudster Stan Lauryssens on the programme, at the expense, some critics say, of lesser-known authors and established literary figures.
1 932

first edition of Boekenbeurs

20 000

surface area of fair in square metres

154 760

visitors to 2013 edition

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