A Visit to Zvaigzne ABC

Today we visited the publishing house Zvaigzne ABC in a reconstructed wooden building - the former studio of architect L. Šmits on Biķernieku Street - and also went on a tour of the adjacent printing house Poligrāfists. We had the opportunity to peek into the spacious warehouse rooms, filled to the ceiling with bales of books, as well as the workshops where, with monotonous, rhythmic yet precise movements of workers' hands, books, exercise books, drawing albums, planners and the like are being cut, glued and sewn through with white thread.

This was followed by conversations about and around books - already published ones, forthcoming ones, and planned ones. Kārlis Sīmanis, project manager at Zvaigzne ABC, introduced us to a practical advice book that had come out literally just a couple of days earlier - "3x9 Jāņi" - a guide to celebrating the Midsummer festival in the 21st century. The book is engaging, in my view, also because it compiles summer solstice songs with their sheet music, lyrics and QR codes, which with the help of a two-dimensional code scanning app on a smartphone allow you to open and listen to these folk songs performed by folklore ensembles on YouTube.

No less interesting seemed the book for salespeople who love their work and want to develop their skills, as well as for anyone who wants to learn to "sell" themselves in this market economy era - "The Sales Wizard".

Kārlis mentioned that translation work is currently under way and that Steve Jobs's autobiography will be published in Latvian at the end of summer. He also gave us a glimpse of the working materials for an upcoming book by musician Rolands Ūdrs (a.k.a. Ūdrīšs), featuring photographs from a journey through India.

Editor Bārbala Simsone told us about and let us hold and leaf through the just-published book by journalist and host of the "100g kultūras" programme, Arno Jundze: "Week of Tasty Chicken" - with its distinctive cover illustration of Milda, the figure atop the Freedom Monument, with her palms pressed over her ears.

A revelation to me (I confess, I did not know) was the already second poetry book by actor Andris Bulis - "Stops". The book also comes with a CD featuring music by Toms Juhņēvičs, which serves as a wonderful backdrop, complement or mood-setter for the author's poetry.

Then Zvaigzne ABC representative Kristīne Sadovska spoke at length - but most importantly, engagingly - about several works of fiction, both local and translated, and for several of them I now have "a hook in my lip" and am eager to read them. Now waiting their turn are "When God Was a Rabbit" and the Norwegian author Per Petterson's "Out Stealing Horses". The latter appealed to me with its subtitle, under which I am almost ready to sign my name, as I fully agree - "It only hurts as much as you allow it to".

Kristīne also informed us that in July a detective fiction fans' club will be launched and several translated novels in the genre will be released.

From the iinuu.lv side there were also questions to the Zvaigzne ABC representatives about Latgalian literature and whether there are plans to publish any. The answer was that simply no works written in the Latgalian language have ever been submitted. So, it seems, Latgalian authors need to pull themselves together.

We also enquired about the topic of transhumanist philosophy and whether any book on this unusual contemporary movement would be published in the near future. We had been inspired by Aivars Andersons's article "Overcoming Humanism" on satori.lv, which had gathered more than 500 comments. It turns out nothing of the sort has been heard of at Zvaigzne's house - but who knows, everything flows and changes.

It is positive that most books published by Zvaigzne ABC are also available in electronic format (egramatnica.lv), although they are not yet available on the Amazon Kindle reader.

Here is also a small photo glimpse of today's event: