Box within a box – My First Bologna Book Fair - Nosy Crow Skip to content
Posted by Nosy Crow, March 20, 2015

Box within a box – My First Bologna Book Fair

Having started at Nosy Crow in November last year, blissfully unscathed by the Frankfurt Book Fair that had finished just before I arrived, the past month has been my very first experience of preparing for a major fair.

Lots of the Bologna prep has been very exciting. Loads of proofs arrived yesterday ready for foreign rights selling at the fair, which is always a fun time to be in the office as everybody gets to see all of their hard work finally in book format. I particularly like seeing the novelty book proofs, and everyone has a go at the sliders and flaps (see above – in the picture is a proof for a title called Box, illustrated by Rosalind Beardshaw and written by Min Flyte, which we will be publishing later this year).

I’ve also been putting together the Bologna rights schedule, an enormous spreadsheet of appointments with foreign publishers that Kate, Adrian and Ola will be taking. At the moment I’m confirming appointments times, which involves emailing everybody on the schedule again, and I like to imagine my emails shooting out of our office in south London and appearing in inboxes around the globe, from South Korea to Brazil.

Some parts of the prep have been slightly less exciting, of course, such as packing up the boxes to be shipped to Italy, but it must be said that there is a certain thrill to be found in lurking around the office, stealing proofs and stationery from unsuspecting Crows to go in the Bologna boxes…

The first shipment of boxes of books and furniture for our stand at the fair went off this morning and it was a huge relief seeing all of the boxes, duct-taped to within an inch of their lives, being loaded into the van. And I didn’t even have to run down the road after the van, waving a rogue Pip and Posy or Dinosaur Dig, which was an unexpected plus. The final shipment is going next Friday, so I’m back to my office-supply-thieving ways until then…

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