The clans gather at the annual Bologna Children's Book Fair. Courtesy of Bologna Children's Book Fair.

In the spring, when thunderheads threaten and sun streaks through in a crazy chiaroscuro, the clans gather at a fair in a crossroads in Northern Italy.

There is the book agent clan, proud paladins often travelling alone, taciturn about their business -- unless they have a deal for you.

There is the foreign rights clan, who will only speak with you hurriedly between meetings. You are not here to buy translation rights? See you later.

Then there is the licensing gang, all business and meetings, busy defining new finance models for European co-productions and busy reverse engineering Disney.

There is Clan Illustrator, the more bohemian participants, meandering the aisles with their portfolios and posting samples at the notice board.

Then there are the untouchables, the Translators. They are the oppressed working class of the fair, stuck in a corner of Pavilion 30, discussing their ever-deteriorating working conditions.

The most curious thing about the Bologna Children's Book Fair is that the articles about it are so varied, like the parable of the blind men each describing the part of the elephant they are touching. It's almost as if a horde of reporters descended upon a market town and each came away describing the place in a different way, depending on what shop they visited: "the town of sausages," "home of the artichoke," or "the capital of cheese." It's perfectly normal when there are so many stories going around. It's like finding your way through the Istanbul souk or the back canals in Venice. Everyone's encounter with the exotic is bound to be different based on the baggage they bring with them.

But underneath it all is a choreography of meetings set up well in advance, with little patience for anything that goes off script, such as a reporter showing up and asking questions.

Publicity-shy agents felt… exposed… in their new location. Unless noted, photo credit for all images: Russell Bekins.

Clan Agent -- Fleeting Horrors
The Bologna Children's Book Fair has made it into the annals of publishing history because publisher Arthur Levine discovered the Harry Potter books there. His lead came from a British publisher to a British agent, who took him to J.K. Rowling, and the rest is history.

Agents, therefore, often hold the keys to paradise, and finding so many in one place sets producers and executives on pilgrimage.

This year, the agents had a new venue, upstairs overlooking the halls. These secretive folks were most upset over their new location, a sort of goldfish bowl where their deal-making was on public display and the tables packed as close as an upscale sushi restaurant. There were rumors of a petition to return the agents' area to a more reserved location and stories of agents working out of publishers' booths... which might also be closer to the bathrooms.

The buzz seemed to focus on horror and fantasy, or more precisely, fantasy as the gateway to more horrific offerings. McIntosh and Otis was offering How to Cook and Eat Children by Keith McGowan. The Donald Mass Literary Agency offered The Big Splash by Jack D. Ferraiolo, a juinor high school noir about scholastic mafiosi. Other offerings included Todd Strasser's Wish You Were Dead, where a high school student's adolescent wish to see popular students disappear comes true. But it was impossible to see these offerings among all of the other books on the floor. You had to dig in the publishers' blogs to know where the action was.

But fundamentally the book agents were the wraiths of the fair, flitting and disappearing, occasionally dropping a card as evidence of their passing. If you could catch one, you might get some information. Or not, as we will see later on.

Clan Publisher -- Fiefs and Dragons
Here the business is dolloping out translation rights into the various languages of the world. "We come here to license our content to international publishers," says Rick Pam of Brighter Minds Media, conceding a brief interview before turning to his next appointment. Though most of the deals are made on books from Europe, the market is for the entire world, and Pam asserts that business is good.

Among this literary clan, loyalties and family names are as confusing as the Yorks and Lancasters in a Shakespearean history play. One passes these reassuring household names you once found on school textbooks and discover that their world is a bit... Balkanized. Ah, Random House, a familiar name, is part of the... Bertelsmann clan? Are we taking about Random House Australia, London, or New York? For each is a proud fiefdom, sporting their own books in the name of glocalism. Ah, there's McMillan! But is that Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, Henry Holt, Kingfisher, McGraw Hill, or a welter of other agents there at their stand? Not one agent could tell you anything about the properties of the other, nor was anyone forthcoming about the fact that the entire group is now owned by German publisher Verlagsgruppe Georg von Holtzbrinck GmbH. Perhaps the feudal metaphor is apt.

Farrar, Straus and Giroux's elegant subsidiary rights manager Deane R. Norton showed us Starlight Goes to Town, the promising story of a Tennessee chicken who wants to be a runway model in Milan. Authored by Harry Allard and drawn by George Booth (whose work inspired the live-action film The Stupids), this seems a work more appropriate for animation. By the way, FSG published one of the winners of this year's Bologna Ragazzi Book Awards, The Wall by Peter Sis, which recounts growing up in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War in prose, drawings and montages.