Publishers and Booksellers Guild to organise nine-day long book festival at College Square

Kolkata: The Publishers and Booksellers Guild will organize a nine-day long festival titled Nababarsha Boi Utsav 2018 at College Square on Friday.

Partha Chatterjee, state Education minister along with Bratya basu, state IT minister and Debashis Kumar, member, Mayor -in-council (Parks and Squares), Kolkata Municipal Corporation (KMC) will be present at the inaugural function.

Noted poet Sankhya Ghosh, litterateur Sanjib Chattopadhyay, Samaresh Majumdar, Srijato and Smaranjit Chakraborti are likely to be present at the inaugural function. There will be traditional folk performance like Jhumur, Ranpa, women Dhaki group and Baul. Tridib Kumar Chatterjee, honourable general secretary of Publishers and Booksellers Guild said 79 stalls will be put up.

He said the sole purpose of the festival is to woo young people to read books. The venue of the festival is College Square which has played a major role in Bengal renaissance. The water tank is surrounded by schools and colleges. It has Presidency College now University, Calcutta University, Sanskrit University and Hindu School and hare School within its vicinity. "The area also houses the biggest book market in Asia selling both old books and new ones. Through the nine-day long festival we would like to address the booklovers to come to the area and buy books to develop their reading habit at a time when it is fast falling," Chatterjee said.

The festival was started in 2014. Bengali tradition and culture is intimately associated with buying of books on Bengali New Years' Day which falls on April 15. Every publishing house used to hold functions which were attended by writers and readers. Both were given a packet of sweets and seven to eight new numbers were released on the first day of Bengali New Year. But over the years , the number of Bengali readers is going down. The publishing houses no longer organise functions where readers used to get a chance to meet the authors. The guild hold mini book fair in big housing complexes just to facilitate people to develop the reading habit.