Focus IBBY

International Children's Book Day 2019

ICBD 2019 is sponsored by IBBY Lithuania. The poster and message are by well-known Lithuanian author and artist Kęstutis Kasparavičius, who was the 2018 Lithuanian nominee for the Hans Christian Andersen Award. The poster is available from the IBBY Secretariat and IBBY Lithuania.

Books Help Us Not to Rush

I'm in a hurry!…I don't have time!…Good-bye!…We hear words like that almost every day, not only in Lithuania, which is in the very center of Europe, but in many other places of the world. No less frequently do we hear that we live in the age of information overload, haste, and rush.

But if you take a book into your hands, you immediately feel a change. It seems that books have this wonderful quality—they help us slow down. As soon as you open a book and delve into its tranquil depths, you no longer fear that things will whizz by at a maddening speed while you see nothing. All of a sudden, you come to believe you won't have to dash off like a bat out of hell to do some urgent work of little importance. In books, things happen quietly and in a precisely arranged order. Maybe because their pages are numbered, maybe because the pages rustle gently and soothingly as you leaf through them? In books, events of the past calmly meet events that are yet to come.

The universe of a book is wide open; it happily fuses reality with imagination and fantasy. And sometimes you wonder if it was in a book or in life that you noticed how beautifully the drops of thawing snow drip from the roof, or how pleasing to the eye is the neighbor's wall overgrown with moss. Do you know it from a book or from reality that rowan berries are not only beautiful, but also bitter? Was it in a book or in reality that you were lying in the summer grass, or sitting with your legs crossed, watching clouds sail by in the sky?

Books help us not to rush, books teach us to notice things, and books invite us, or even make us sit down for a while. We usually read sitting, with a book on our desk or on our lap, don't we?

And haven't you experienced another miracle—that when you read a book, the book reads you? Yes, of course, books can read. They read your forehead, eyebrows, the corners of your lips as they rise and fall, but, first and foremost, books read your eyes. And looking into your eyes, they see… Well, you know what!

I am sure that books are never bored when they are on your lap. Someone who enjoys reading—be it a child or adult—is much more interesting than someone who doesn't care for books, who is always racing against the clock, who never has time to sit down, who fails to notice much of what surrounds us.

On the International Children's Book Day, my wish to all of us is:

Let there be interesting books for readers and interesting readers for books!

Kęstutis Kasparavičius

East Meets West around Children's Books and Fairy Tales: 36th IBBY International Congress, Athens, Greece, August 30 to September 1, 2018

For three days crossing from August to September, IBBY members and other experts in the field of children's literature from the East, West, North, and South met in Athens, Greece, as they attended the 36th IBBY International Congress.

The Congress was organized by IBBY Greece under the leadership of IBBY Greek President and Conference President Vassiliki Nika. She was assisted by a committee of twelve people, and a scientific committee of nine, led by Chair Petros Panaou. These twenty-three dedicated people ran a successful IBBY Congress after a record of just seventeen months of preparation.

The Congress opened on Thursday, August 30, at the Megaron Athens International Conference Centre with a warm welcome by Chryssoula Katsavria, Member of...