The world’s largest celebration of the written word, the Edinburgh International Book Festival, begun this weekend and we even got a sunny day for it and a warm, dry evening for the launch party on Saturday night. Recovered from the opening night party, I decided to take a break from the Festival Fringe madness (the world’s biggest book festival takes place while the world’s biggest arts festival is happening around it – August is a busy time in Edinburgh!) and relax in the gardens at the Book Fest with some graphic novels, a bit of comics reading al fresco. While I was there soaking in the atmosphere of the busy book fest I paid a visit to the onsite bookstore (actually there are two – the kids get their own entire bookstore to themselves!) and checked out the very nice display the staff have made for the graphic novels section.
As we’ve reported here over several years now, the Book Fest has been holding more comics events and the onsite bookstore has expanded their display of graphic novels (I’m delighted to say we’ve given them some help in that regard each year) and again they’ve given the comics works a good display spot for browsers to have a look. Again there is a particularly good display of titles from the excellent British Indy publishers like Blank Slate Books and SelfMadeHero – good to see them on offer at such a huge literary event and so prominently displayed (just see Nelson peering out at us!), made me smile to see them being browsed by festival goers. I’ll be attending some of the comics events, including the return of Grant Morrison, Bryan and Mary Talbot and the Martin Rowson events and will hopefully be posting up some reports of the events here as usual, so stay tuned (pics from my Flickr, click for larger versions).
Sun, Aug 12, 2012
Books, Comics and cartoons, Conventions and events