Gaudeamus Radio Romania comes to a close

A heaven for book lovers, the 29th edition of the Gaudeamus Book Fair in Bucharest, organised by Radio Romania with the support of the Culture Ministry, came to a close on Sunday, after five days of book launches, debates, discussions between authors and readers and other events. Over 200 publishing houses took part in the fair, which hosted more than 600 events. Every day, readers visited the book stands which came with a varied offer of new titles and also with reedited books, which reflected in the huge book sales. Children also had a lot of books to pick from.

 It was a joy for many people the fact that the largest Romanian book fair was finally held in a physical format, after two years of pandemic. The fair’s president of honor, poet Ana Blandiana, said on the opening day that Gaudeamus helps authors and readers discover each other. „Book fairs are generally organized by publishers and publishers’ associations who want to sell their books. Well, the Radio does not have such interest. It is, in a large sense, the most candid of fairs,” Blandiana said. ”Gaudeamus is a book fair which does not have any material interest, because the Radio is only a culture institution and culture is founded on culture. So the Radio’s only interest is for people to read,” the poet also said.

“Teodoros”, the novel of the renowned Romanian writer Mircea Cartarescu has been elected the most wanted book of the fair, following readers’s vote. Cartarescu said that the novel, an old project of his, is a book written with a lot of love, the first one having readers at heart. Cartarescu said that it is only now that he has had the necessary maturity to write such novel. ”It would have been useless to start writing it when I was 25 or 30. Nothing good would have come of it. I had not yet read, at the time, the essential books which are vital in order to be able to write and especially to understand them. I did not have, before, a good understanding of the Bible, which is an essential book. I did not even know about the existence of the so-called Ethiopian Bible, of rare beauty. It is called Kebra Nagast and it corresponds to the traditional Ethiopian Church, which is thousand years old,” Mircea Cartarescu explained.

Gaudeamus also hosted the launch of the book “The First World War and the Great Union of Romanians”, released by Universitaria Publishers, in 6 volumes. It is a project which started in 2016 and has ended this year. Over 120 researchers from various fields, such as history, religion, law, geography as well as army generals, war veterans, professors and priests participated in the writing of these volumes. (EE)