Will ‘Books’ magazine find “a new saviour, or the means to be reborn a second time, in one form or another?” This is the question posed on the magazine’s website by Olivier Postel-Vinay, director and founder of this current affairs magazine through books.
Books, the magazine of ideas and European literature, is once again threatened with extinction. “The Actissia group being put into liquidation, the January-February issue of this review, “Faut-il restitur l’art africaine” is also the last underline Olivier Postel-Vinay, the founder and editor of the journal. He is the guest of European microphone.
franceinfo: is there a small hope, or is it really over the adventure of Books?
Olivier Postel-Vinay: Two years ago, the company was liquidated. And it starts again today. But not for the same reasons. This is because the group which had acquired Books is itself liquidated. So we are caught in the net of this liquidation, which does not, perhaps, exclude a rebirth; it’s not totally impossible, but it assumes that there are people who are interested in it.
But Books was all the same the great meeting place for this European and international literature. We knew what was published in Europe, as novels, as scientific works too. And it was not only that, it was also the magazine of ideas?
Yes, it’s mainly a magazine focused on essays, although we also talk about novels, but more in the way that novels give us ideas. And it is an international magazine which is based on the analysis of books published all over the world, but particularly in Europe. And we had where we have, I don’t know if we have to speak in the past tense, excellent correspondents concerning Central Europe, Germany, the Czech Republic, Poland.
And it’s important to mobilize because it’s the only one, it’s the only one. And I repeat, it was a real monthly appointment?
Yes, we have received many letters of support recently, for example: “I would dare a ‘everything gets lost’, says a reader, to describe how I feel. But let’s not give up, the culture will pass, and you will come back in another form, another format, with another project and carry the voice”.
It is somewhere also a light that enlightens us…
Yes, it is a formula that is often found in letters from readers. For example, “breathing in a world that borders on asphyxiation”.
Olivier Postel-Vinay, many people got involved?
A lot of people got involved. There is a prestigious support committee, including that of Annie Ernaux. And obviously, I hope that we will find either a press group or a publishing group, or a sponsor who will make the necessary cultural gesture, because it is a cultural gesture.
In your support committee, there are around sixty personalities such as Claude Askolovitch, Olivier Barrot, Jérôme Clément, Jean-Philippe Domecq, Annie Ernaux, the Nobel Prize for Literature, Eric Fottorino, Dan Frank, Jean-Noël Jeanneney, Philippe Meyer, Gérard Mordillat, Françoise Nyssen, Natacha Polony, Robin Renucci, Alain-Gérard Slama, Emmanuel Todd, Olivier Weber, Michel Winock.
And you’re right, it’s a cultural gesture because what you bring us is information that we don’t know, that is to say publishing. What is edited elsewhere? Because it is true that somewhere today, we are living in a very anxiety-provoking period, a period also of hubris, we need this meeting. It’s a breath of fresh air.
Yes, everything that is published elsewhere, the books that appear in the world and which resonate with our concerns, but which also enlighten us from an angle – a good exercise in critical thinking – which is based on the crossing of views towards the outside world, and on ideas much more varied and much less orthodox than we imagine, and as they are often presented to us by the media.
It’s really the idea of going beyond the maelstrom, zapping the Internet, beyond appearances, to show that there is deeper food for thought, but also relatively easier to access than we could imagine, from the books that appear in the world, and from high-level articles that have appeared about these books, and written by the authors of books. With fabulous translators, many of whom are now part of the team at Books.
Writers too, like Baptiste Touverey, journalist and translator?
Of course, who is a pillar, he is at the same time Normalien, Germanist, novelist and translator.
And then the attraction of Bookseven if Books was on the Internet, of course, it was also the Books paper that we were going to buy?
There is an attachment, a fidelity. Contrary to what we often think, there are readers who prefer paper, because with paper, you can sit down, you can think, you don’t have to go fast.
It’s made for everyone, is it for everyone?
In fact, it is a very wide range of people representative of the French population, curious in spirit, and concerned with independence.
Olivier Postel-Vinay, we are going to give a contact to those who want to write to you because Books will disappear. But no, you still have to Books reborn.
An address : [email protected].