The heavy visitor turnout at Amar Ekushey Boi Mela 2016 during the weekend continued yesterday as young couples celebrating Valentine’s Day visited the fair.
Thousands of visitors, donning beautiful red attires and crowns made of red roses on their heads, swarmed the fairgrounds as soon as the doors opened at 3pm.
Visitors attending “Love for a Dhaka,” a concert held at Shahbagh area yesterday, also stopped by the book fair, adding to the already big crowd.
The massive turnout made the publishers and book stall and pavilion owners quite happy as they reported a fairly impressive sales yesterday, although not as good as the weekend sales.
Romance was in the air at the fairgrounds just as the rest of the city; young couples in love were seen roaming around, exchanging with each other the gifts of flowers and books they bought at the fair.
One couple, requesting to remain unnamed, told the Dhaka Tribune that they had spent the day roaming around the fairgrounds.
The woman, a DU student, said she had bought Helal Hafiz’s “Je Joley Agun Jwoley” for her boyfriend, while he had bought her a poetry collection of Abul Hasan.
“We both love books. Oh, and roses, too!” said the boyfriend, also a student of Dhaka University.
Attendants at several stalls told the Dhaka Tribune that poetry books had been the popular choice among visitors yesterday. Among the most demanded books were the poetry collections of Nirmalendu Goon, Jibanananda Das, Mahadev Saha, Syed Shamsul Haque and Shamsur Rahman.
Expressing satisfaction over yesterday’s sales, Tamralipi publisher AKM Tarikul Islam Rony said: “Since today is Valentine’s Day, a lot more visitors turned out at the fair than we usually expect on a weekday, thus boosting the sales.”
The fair saw the release of 93 new books yesterday. With them, the total number of new arrivals this year stands at 1,621.
Two book stalls shut down
Amid all the festivity, the book fair committee’s copyright task force shut down two book stalls named Rangin Phul and Neel Pori at Bangla Academy for selling pirated books and books published by other publishers without authorisation.
“We shut them down because they breached the rules. We seized over 100 books from them,” said task force chief Manzurur Rahman, adding that they had earlier shut down the stall of Oikya Prakashani on February 9 for the same reason.
