Who hasn't taken home at least one of the copies of the Book to the Wind collection? How many times have we found the books for sale, knowing that they are free circulation, in the alleys of the Center? Surely more than one, when entering a bookstore, the bookseller has told us that we can take one of these books. “They're free.” Who is not happy when they tell them something is free? And speaking of books, then even more so. That has been the essence of this collection since its inception, in 2004, to make literature available to everyone.
At that time, the editor Ana Roda, today director of the Banco de la República Library Network, was responsible for the Literature Management of the District Secretariat for Culture, Recreation and Sport. In a conversation with the writer Laura Restrepo, he had the idea of starting a traveling library that could give all citizens access to the consumption of literature. After completing the project and overcoming all the bureaucratic stages, he started Libro al Viento. We also owe it to her as readers, among many other things, the Bibliostations of Transmilenio and the Reading Policy for the city, by the way.
To date, Libro al Viento has already recorded more than 160 published titles and around 5,436,813 copies distributed in different libraries, bookstores and communities throughout the city. Names such as those of Gabriel García Márquez, Esteban Echeverria, Manuel Zapata Olivella, Rafael Pombo, Anton Chekhov, William Shakespeare, Guillaume Apollinaire and Sofocles, among others, have been part of the collection, as well as Piedad Bonnett, Álvaro Mutis, José Asunción Silva, Ramón Cote, Orlando Echeverri Benedetti, María Go Glantz and Betina Gonzalez, more many other names, integrate the different anthologies of short stories, chronicles and poetry, which also address foreign authors and foreign literatures.
This is a program that has been designed with the aim of encouraging people to read and thus increase the cultural capital of the city, transforming the usual channels and places where books are circulated. According to official communications, it is about meeting potential readers in unconventional spaces such as parks, public transport, waiting rooms, market places, prisons, hospitals, among others. This collection is a public good, so it is expected that once read, books will pass from one hand to the other. Ultimately, the aim is to increase the reading rates of the people of Bogota, to open the circle of distribution of literary works and, with it, to facilitate access to and enable them to be redefined and appropriate in novel ways and by social groups that are usually far from cultural epicenters, and to strengthen participation citizens, as well as the full enjoyment and use of the public.
There are four collections of Book to the Wind: The Universal Collection, whose copies are identified by the color orange on its spines, which groups together all texts of wide universal value in the literary tradition of different eras and latitudes; the capital collection, in purple, which includes texts whose theme is Bogotá and its surroundings , and this includes everything from short stories to chronicles and short essays; the initial collection, in lemon green, focused on children; and the side collection, in blue, which brings together non-traditional genres such as graphic novels, caricatures, illustrations and epistolaries, among others.
Recently, the program, headed by Adriana Martínez Villalba, who was once the editor of the Colombian subsidiary of Penguin Random House, has launched a new phase of it in which a new image is committed to a new image, much more current and fresh. With designs by Camila Cardenosa and the Bastarda Type team, the new titles of Book to the Wind will start circulating from... The inner pages have also seen a change, the typographic box was redesigned to improve the reading experience. The program will be 20 years old in 2024 and it has been thought that this is the right time to relocate it on the readers' radar. Based on the original design of Camilo Umaña, one of Colombia's great publishing designers, Libro al Viento reinvents itself to reach a wider audience.
The three initial titles of the new version of Book to the Wind are Stories of Eusebius, by Ivar Da Coll,
Walking and A Life Without Principles, by Henry David Thoreau,
and A Simple Heart, by Gustave Flaubert.
Books, in addition to being physically available, can also be downloaded through Google and Apple books. It is hoped that they will be able to get a great reception from readers. Adriana Martínez points out, exclusively for Infobae, that Libro al Viento publishes between seven and eight new titles that circulate freely in Bogotá every year. For this edition of the Bogotá International Book Fair, in partnership with the Korean Embassy in Colombia and the Korean Institute of Letters, an anthology of Korean stories and poems will be published entitled The End Has Finally Begun. A set of wonderful texts by contemporary authors who, for the most part, will be in Bogotá during the FILbo.
Another exciting new feature this year is an anthology of texts by Andrés Caicedo, which thanks to the generosity of his heiresses, arrives at Libro al Viento in a selection by Sandro Romero Rey, designed so that younger readers, who do not know Caicedo's work, have the opportunity to read it and get closer to the work of this Caleño author. Each editor gives his vision to the project. At the time it was seen like this with Antonio García Ángel and now with Adriana Martínez.
When asked about how much the concept of the project is renewed, since the graphic change is evident, he responds: “The concept of the program is the same as the one that the writer Laura Restrepo proposed since its creation: It is a program to promote reading, but it is also a citizen culture program in which we promote trust among readers. We just hand over the books, understood as public goods of the people of Bogota, and we encourage exchange, free movement and, above all, the citizen encounter around reading.”
What a good change this is for the collection, in short. I hope your readers will receive it that way. For my part, I already have these first titles, which really turned out very well, and I look forward to what is coming.
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