Book Festival
The Book Festival was also providing e-tickets for online bookers, but for those booking in person, they were given the option of an old-fashioned paper ticket. My press tickets were also of the paper kind, which is fine by me.
The last time I was at the Book Festival, it was still at Charlotte Square Gardens, as it had been since it was first created. Although it had started to expand along the end of George Street, everything was still in a nice compact area mostly focussed on the gardens, making it feel like an isolated area of calm away from the bustling, scattered madness of the Fringe. The new venue at Edinburgh College of Art was receiving a mixed reception from the comments I overheard.
The venues for events are mostly indoors rather than under canvas, so no pausing to wait for the Tattoo’s fireworks to finish during an evening event or feeling you were about to take off on a stormy day. However the outdoor areas are on a steep slope and the indoor ones on more than one floor, which disabled visitors found more difficult to negotiate than when everything was on one level in Charlotte Square. Some events were at Central Hall, which is a perfect venue for the larger scale events, but it’s several blocks away from the Art College across a busy main road.
The facilities at the Art College allow the Festival to more easily broadcast events online, which they did last year and a selection of this year’s programme was again live-streamed, some of which is still available to watch until the end of the year free or for a donation. Some of those that were streamed could also be watched in the outdoor part of the Art College grounds on a large screen in front of a grass bank where some seating was available if you didn’t want to sit on the ground. Rather than the two bookshop tents for adults’ and children’s books, there was a single indoor bookshop that seemed smaller and with less variety than either of the old ones. Having pot plants on the outdoor tables would have been a nice touch if they had been given some attention, but most of them were looking rather the worse for wear even on the first weekend.
Catering is something that has always been very up and down at the Book Festival. This time, they had access to the Art College’s cafeteria, which was quite nice and had plenty of plug sockets for laptops and phones, but the service was a little slow and they shut at 5PM—from the number of people I saw trying the door in the evenings, especially when it was cold and wet, I’m sure it would have been worth them opening. The alternative in the evening was a van selling mostly toasties, but this also wasn’t exactly fast food, so not ideal if you wanted to grab something as you rush between events. There was also a coffee van at the front which looked nice but I didn’t try it.
The bar had beer and cider on draught, unlike the last time I was at Charlotte Square, although they still seem to think that ‘beer’ only means lager (it’s some years since they served Deuchars IPA on draught). However we certainly were missing Unbound, the regular free evening events that used to happen in the Spiegeltent in Charlotte Square featuring performances by musicians, poets, authors and others who were at one of the festivals in the city or who had been brought in specially. There was always a fantastic atmosphere and we saw some great people and performances, but the Art College in the evening was dead, with very few people choosing to sit in the chilly courtyard with their plastic pots of beer even when it wasn’t raining.
One of the strands of events at the Book Festival that has continued over the last few years in conjunction with the Royal Lyceum Theatre is Playing With Books, in which a group of actors and other theatre artists spend some time in a rehearsal room taking apart a book and creating a scratch performance from it. The results have varied from rough sketches of a possible staging to something that looks only a short step away from a full theatrical presentation. This year, there was one event that took that step into a full production with a full run of performances, This is Memorial Device, and it was a definite highlight of my time in Edinburgh.
But the beauty of the Book Festival is that the subjects covered are so wide, not only is there likely to be something to appeal to most people, but there are probably a few subjects you think you might quite like that it’s worth taking a chance on. Of course I went to see Alan Cumming while I was there and Brian Cox on the live-stream after I’d left, and they were both wonderful, but I also enjoyed a very entertaining talk by a couple of palaeontologists so much that I watched it again on-demand when I got home.
So while I and others I listened to had niggles about the venue and the facilities, the events themselves were still varied and well-presented with some world-class speakers and guests, and really, that’s what’s important.