Days and the fifty-fourth session of the Cairo International Book Fair will start, in a session bearing the slogan "Egypt's Identity... Culture and the Question of the Future", in which the Kingdom of Jordan will be the guest of honor of the exhibition, and the name of the great poet Salah Jahin, the Personality of the Year, will be held during the period from 25 January this year until February 6 next.
The nucleus of this exhibition was in 1963 in the form of a book week, with the participation of 10 Egyptian publishers and publishers from four Arab countries: Lebanon, Iraq, Syria, and Jordan. The “Arabic Book Week” in the Fayoum educational area, in which publishing houses participated, such as Dar Al-Maarif, the Modern Publications Foundation, Dar Nahdet Misr and others. Cultural seminars were held during this week, and the cost of this exhibition was only 150 pounds.
It seems that the success of the idea tempted the Ministry of Culture to circulate the idea throughout the Republic, so in October 1963 it held a book fair entitled: “The First Arab Book Week” with the participation of 48 publishers and scientific bodies, and 13 Arab publishers from Lebanon, Iraq and Yemen. The Ministry prepared a daily program of literary seminars for the exhibition, and held an exhibition on the development of printing.
This exhibition is the nucleus of the current Cairo International Book Fair, whose idea, according to Tharwat Okasha, Minister of Culture, in his memoirs “My Memoirs in Politics and Culture,” dates back to a proposal submitted by the artist Abdel Salam Al-Sharif to him on the need to establish an international book fair in Egypt, says Dr. Tharwat Okasha: "I contacted the well-known international book market in Leipzig, and sent the representative of the Ministry of Culture, Professor Islam Shalaby, to pave the way for holding an exhibition similar to it on the Arab scale."
Dr. Suhair Al-Qalamawi was assigned to supervise the first session of this exhibition. Twenty-seven countries and more than 400 publishing houses participated in the exhibition, and more than seventy thousand visitors visited it. The exhibition lasted only ten days. The fair is other specialized book fairs, such as the Cairo International Children's Book Fair, which began in 1984 and takes place in November of each year, before it stopped for years.
Planning began for a place wider than the place of the land of the island, which began to narrow the exhibition and the public, and the thinking turned to the international fairgrounds in Nasr City, where the area of the exhibition increased to 7200 m, and later reached an area of 100 acres, to be the largest exhibition area in the world, and with the beginning of the announcement As for moving the exhibition from the island to Nasr City, people were amazed at how it was possible to go to the end of the world, and to move the exhibition from the heart of lively Cairo, to the heart of the desert where Nasr City was at the time.
Indeed, the exhibition was moved to the exhibition grounds in Nasr City, and it settled there for the past thirty years, and the visitors to the exhibitions increased, until it reached 4.5 million visitors during its 49th session, this year, and the exhibition remained organized to be held every year, and it only stopped once during In 2011, due to the revolution of January 25, and with the increase in interaction with the exhibition and in light of the call for the need to develop it to keep pace with the great development, the General Authority for International Exhibitions and Conferences decided to move the exhibition grounds to the Fifth Settlement, with an area of 40,000 square meters allocated for holding the book fair, and designing it in the latest ways. International World Fairs.
Thu, Jan. 12, 2023
