West Bengal Chief Minister Mamata Banerjee during the inauguration of the 47th International Kolkata Book Fair-2024, in Kolkata, on Thursday, Jan. 18, 2024.
| Photo Credit: PTI
For the little magazines of Bengal — there are hundreds of them — the Kolkata Book Fair is a big opportunity, providing these small but committed publications a platform to present themselves to the outside world.
Little magazines, as Encyclopaedia Britannica will tell you, are periodicals “devoted to serious literary writings, usually avant-garde and non-commercial”, and West Bengal boasts of hundreds of them, if not a few thousands, with most of them getting to step out of anonymity during the annual book fair.
“The book fair is the biggest advertisement for us — how else would people find us? It is here they usually get to know of us and if they like our work, they later connect with us. You can say the book fair is the place where we establish our identity,” said Swapnanjan Goswami, who co-edits a quarterly called Coffee House er Chaar Paashe (meaning All around Coffee House), which may not be hugely popular but which has a committed readership across the world, including countries in Asia, Europe and North America.
At the book fair, the little magazines are not given stalls but are assigned tables, all under a single canopy. This year — the fair began on January 18 and will continue till January 31 — there are around 300 little magazine tables and each has been charged a nominal amount, ₹590, for the entire two-week duration.
Aranya Mitra, a young editor with the Leftist magazine Naya Disha, said the little magazines sought to break the monopoly of big publishers and to reach out to people. “We are a political magazine, but then, what isn’t political today? Even magazines about management have political undertones. We people don’t think about profit, we want to connect with people and the book fair gives us that opportunity. It is a good time for adda — not only with visitors but also with people from surrounding tables,” Mr. Mitra said.
There are readers who visit the fair mainly to spend time at the little magazine tables. They are not only familiar with the well-known names but are also aware of what these publications have to offer at the fair. One such reader is school teacher Amartya Bandopadhyay, who hunts for good poetry and essays. “This year I am going to visit the stalls of Anustup, Korok, and particularly Doshomik, which has come out with a translation of William Faulkner’s story A Rose for Emily, done by a well-known Bengali poet,” he said.