Queen Letizia has once again inaugurated a new edition of the Madrid Book Fair in the Retiro Park showing his interest in various authors and works, curiously in several cases related to the world of cinema: from Garci to Hitchcock, passing through Pasolini.
At the time scheduled for the opening, at 11.00, the Queen has made an appearance at the Paseo Fernán Núñez del Retiro for, with a fuchsia pink dress, to start a tour whose first stop has been the booth of the Ministry of Culture -as usual-.
This edition of the fair recovers the normality lost in recent years with the pandemic and it has already been noticed from these first hours, since the good weather has encouraged numerous visitors to come closer. Some of them have stopped to see the Queen and try to say hello from a distance, as well as trying to get a photo of Letizia.
One of the first stops on the tour was at the Cervantes y Compañía bookstore in Madrid, from where the Queen left with the book of “one of his favorite authors”, Manuel Astur –‘San, the book of miracles’–, ‘The history of the United States’, by Howard Zinn and a black novel, ‘The small hands’, which curiously is written by the journalist Marina Sanmartín, also co-owner from the bookstore
The journey has continued the Queen has been interested in other authors, although in the end she has not taken any of their books. For example, by Juan Tallón or Agustín Fernández Mallo, although it was at the Reno bookstore where he commented to the managers that he did not take two copies with him –‘Cinema, according to Hitchcock’ and ‘The Usefulness of the Useless’ by Nuccio Ordine– because they were already “like bedside books” in his house.
MOVIE TELEGRAMS
On the Reino de Cordelia label, ‘Telegramas cinephiles’, by José Luis Garci -“the The author himself asked us to give it to him because they had recently met and were talking“, the editor Jesús Egido has told Europa Press. The work ‘The last summer of the USSR’, by Sara Gutiérrez, and ‘Insolation (love story)’, by Emilia Pardo, have also ended up in the Queen’s hands. Bazán, “a very Madrid and feminist book”.
While the Polifemo Bookstore has taken the ‘Selected Works’, by Santiago Ramón y Cajal –coinciding with the author’s centenary–, the Galaxia Gutenberg label has done the same with ‘That moth that flutters in front of me’, poetry reunited by Olvido García Valdés –recent Reina Sofía prize for poetry– and ‘Ulysses’ illustrated by Eduardo Arroyo.
Also ‘Timandra’, by Theodor Kallifatides, an author with whom he has been speaking briefly in English and whom he already knew from a meeting in Stockholm last November. In addition, the publishers have explained that Letizia has shown interest in several of the works of the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini -also in the centenary year-.
OUKA LEELE AND DOMINGO VILLAR
From the Miraguano bookstore he has left with the copy of ‘On the shores of the Bosphorus’, by the diplomat Antonio de Zayas –account of a diplomat who lived in Constantinople in the 1920s–. At this stop, the Queen spoke with Pepa Arteaga, one of the usual booksellers who is retiring this year, and joked with Letizia, assuring that in the next edition they will see each other already having the status “of a walker”.
Finally, there has also been a memory for recently deceased artists, as is the case of Ouka Leele, whose book ‘In this garden, you shall not kill’ has also gone to the Queen. In Siruela, ‘Some complete stories’, by Domingo Villar, culminated a visit of more than an hour and a half to the fair.