Book Fair Without Books: Ten Publishers Pull Out
UIKS's board urged its members on August 6 to withdraw, and Laguna, Delfi, Dereta and seven other publishers have already dropped out. The rest have until August 20 to decide.
In a photograph from the last Book Fair but one, a red wall bearing the Laguna logo blocks half the hall, and beneath it, between tables marked with fifteen and twenty percent discounts, the crowd is so thick the floor is barely visible. That wall will not go up this October. Dejan Papic, owner and director of Laguna, confirmed to N1 that his company will not exhibit at this year’s Belgrade Book Fair, and the list of publishers who made the same call now runs to ten names.
The fair behaves like a fixed holiday on Serbia’s cultural calendar, nine days in late October when sales and programming crowd into the same halls. This time the dates still stand, October 23 to 31, but the exhibitor list is emptying faster than it is filling up.
Who Has Already Said No
The board of the Serbian Publishers and Booksellers Association (UIKS) met on August 6 and recommended that its members withdraw from the fair. The association counts around 140 publishers, and most board members had already made up their minds before the meeting. Not exhibiting:
- Laguna
- Delfi
- Kreativni centar
- Carobna knjiga
- Partenon
- Pcelica
- Dereta
- Finesa
- IPC Media
- Kontrast
The remaining members have until August 20, when exhibitor registration closes. Until then, by all indications, the list is unlikely to shrink.
There is a second group to factor in. More than twenty members of the Association of Professional Publishers of Serbia, among them Arhipelag, Geopoetika and Klio, did not exhibit last year either, and in March they repeated that they would stay away until the exhibiting conditions change. The conditions have not changed. Taken together, October could see both pillars of Serbian publishing absent, the one that lives on print runs and the one that lives on its catalog.
Why Have the City and Publishers Stopped Talking?
The dispute has a clear starting point. In March, the Belgrade City Assembly elected a new Book Fair Board, and not a single publisher sat on it. The association sent a letter demanding an urgent fix; its representatives were invited to board meetings only as observers, without voting rights, and in May they repeated the demand. After that, contact with the organizer stopped.
The minutes of the August meeting spell out why the conversation ended:
Because of this attitude on the part of the Book Fair Board and the City Secretariat for Culture, we first sent a letter demanding that this stance be urgently changed and that publishers be included on the Fair’s Board as soon as possible. We never received a reply to that letter.
Belgrade’s secretary for culture, Jelena Medakovic, countered that “it is not a legal obligation for publishers to be part of the Board, but they can certainly take part in its work through direct communication and initiative. No initiative will be ignored.” Formally, that is accurate. In practice, the body that decides on hall layout, price per square meter and programming is staffed by people who do not make books, while the people who make them are invited to send suggestions from the outside.
The Number That Foretold This Decision
This did not start this summer, and it will not end with a list of names. The fair drew a record 203,350 visitors in 2024 and 134,750 in 2025, a drop of about 34 percent. That decline happened in a year when one association was already out and the other was still in. If the absence of roughly twenty publishers cost a third of the audience, the arithmetic for October writes itself, and publishers say so openly in their minutes, citing it as an added reason to reconsider taking part. Alongside it sits a plainer argument: the rising cost of exhibiting.
The Move to Surcin Behind It All
There is also a reason still working its way to the surface. The fair is due to move to the Expo 2027 complex in Surcin, and publishers wanted a seat on the Board precisely so they could ask about it and propose alternatives. The minutes describe the relocation as “an extremely serious and dangerous challenge to the future of the Belgrade Book Fair” and conclude that the organizers do not see them as partners in running it.
Anyone who has ever carried bags home from the fair knows why that question matters. The Book Fair on Vojvode Misica Boulevard was a walking habit, a tram or a bus and a ten minute walk, school groups arriving together, an afternoon visit after work. Surcin is a different city from that habit, and the decision about it is being made without the people who fill that habit with content.
What Is Left for October 23
We reported a few days ago that exhibitors were pulling out. That sentence now has names, a meeting date and a deadline attached to it. The Belgrade Fair still bills this as the 69th edition, the halls will open, and someone will put together a program. The question is what gets shown in those halls once the publishers behind most of the country’s domestic output and most of its translations have walked out.
For decades, the Book Fair worked as the one place where books got cheaper once a year and piled up in plain sight, and audiences came for that combination. Once the catalogs are pulled out of it, what is left is fairground infrastructure with no reason to walk in. The decision over the Board looked like a formality back in March. By October, its price will be clear.
