Читать книгу The Notebook - José Saramago - Страница 32

The Frankfurt Book Fair begins: gathered there all together, the great entrepreneurs of the book world announce hard times for the object from which we have long derived a living and to which we still owe so much. Apparently all the big publishing houses are there, but there are countless small publishers who cannot travel, who cannot afford the stands that others can, and who are nevertheless fighting against the fulfillment of that fatal prediction: the span of ten years that will see paper books come to an end and digital ones take over. What will the future be like? I don’t know. Although we have not yet reached that day, a day that will go hard for the inhabitants of the Gutenberg galaxy, I offer here a brief tribute to small publishers, for example Spain’s Ânfora, which is about to publish a book by my friend Federico Mayor Zaragoza, the man who wanted Unesco to be something more than just an acronym or an elite place—in other words, a real forum for solving problems, using culture and education as the basic, if not the only, ingredients. I wrote the prologue to Mayor Zaragoza’s book En pie de paz [At the Feet of Peace], which was more a vow than a title, and I have brought it to this blog today as a modest offering, hoping that it might add to the number of those who struggle to improve the lives of others—the lives of the anonymous people who are the substance of the planet.