a spring to leaf through – Corriere.it

Two children holding hands: are they running away from something? Are they looking for a home? Maybe. There is a story already on the cover of Beatrice Alemagna which opens the new issue, the fourth, of «the Reading of girls and boys». Friendship, adventure and that little snail that is there to tell us, perhaps, that it has stopped raining, the forest is less black and spring has arrived. It doesn’t take much to start telling and the elements of the story don’t change over the years, but the universe of “small” publishing, yes, is by no means static and, like children, grows fast.

In numbers: in 2022 in Italy – these are data that the IEA, the Italian Association of Publishers, will bring to the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in a few days – the market for children’s and young people’s books was worth 268.4 million euros. If we also add the comics dedicated to them, the millions rise to 283: it is 18% of what we spent in one year in bookstores (physical and online, small and large). In terms of copies, 23 million books are sold, more than one in five. A reality that requires attention, and not only for the figures: today the literary production for the very young (and for young adults) poses ever more complex questions (the most recent concerns Roald Dahl’s «edited» books by the English publisher Puffin, but the news also takes us to many US states where books dealing with sensitive issues are placed banned from school libraries and the rebellious librarians risk prison), tells stories ever closer to difficult realities, touches on new topics and reaches levels both in the texts and in the illustrations that are not “small” at all.

This is why, for the fourth time, «la Lettura» has chosen to tell this universe, to confront stories, titles, authors and to explore it with a special, created in collaboration with Book on a Tree by Pierdomenico Baccalario, which this time hits newsstands on March 5, not surprisingly on the eve of Children’s Book Fair scheduled in Bologna from 6 to 9 March, a reality (which this year reaches the milestone of sixty editions) which anyone who wants to understand this world cannot ignore. Discover it, monitor it, and even enjoy it: in Bologna, writes Beatrice Masini in the editorial that opens the “Letturina”, “you go to find the place – the story, the book – where you feel happiest”.

Here, «the reading of girls and boys» is meant to be a journey of exploration (in art, in history, in the places of the world where, today, it is more difficult to face reality: the countries at war, Turkey broken by the earthquake , stories that we have been told by those who live them every day). But also a guide, a useful tool for those who — parents, teachers, educators — find themselves navigating the sea of ​​stories in search of advice: in the special they will find titles, of course, and many new editorials, but also suggestions, maps, different points of view to read, study, re-propose and reverse together with children and teenagers, to disassemble and reassemble reality and narratives (and a centerfold, The forest of stories explains exactly how stories are born: who “finds” them, who translates them into books, each role embodied by an animal of the forest).

For guidance, in this March issue (more to come: in summer, in September, at Christmas) as well as the red threads of current events and the Children’s Book Fair in Bologna (and its historic attention to the world of illustration, for example in the homage of thirty artists to Italo Calvino, in the year of the centenary of his birth) we were inspired by the air of the season, by spring. Time of rebirth and flowering, we went to look for it in the great masterpieces of art (Botticelli, but also Easter told by the stations of an imaginary author’s via crucis), in the poem (with a haiku contest between flesh-and-blood poets and artificial intelligences), also in the kitchen (who remembers the Four Seasons? and are Chinese rolls really?), in the cinema, in the music of yesterday and today. Then, since we’re talking about stories, we played with the narrative form, in different ways. One is what binds together the five final short stories, different in genre but linked in an author’s relay. A game, one of many, that fiction gives us, and that we can play from zero to a hundred years.

The presentation in Bologna on Saturday 4

Saturday 4, at 4.30 pm, at the Ambasciatori bookstore in Bologna, the new issue of “La Lettura delle bambini” is presented, with Antonio Troiano, Cristina Taglietti, Beatrice Alemagna and Pierdomenico Baccalario

The number

The new issue of «the reading of girls and boys», the special de
«la Lettura» dedicated to young people, will be on Saturday 4 March as a preview of the «la Lettura» App and on Sunday 5 at the newsstands with «Corriere» and «la Lettura»