Coming Soon - Another Birthday!

Where a café is supposed to be, at a métro entrance.

Get Ready To Get Booked to the Eyeballs

Paris:- Monday, 8. March 1999:- Although the start is more than a week off, I want you to know that the 19th Salon du Livre is almost upon us. In addition to showing off all of France's new books and other intellectual production, this Salon is another anniversary for me.

In 1995, while on the way to buy the digital camera that is still in constant use for this magazine, I saw a poster announcing that year's Salon du Livre. After testing the camera, I proposed doing a 'report' about the Salon by email - and Norman Barth of 'The Paris Pages' took the bait.

In fact, he still takes a monthly slice from Metropole and every year we have a rendez-vous in Paris when each of us goes and waits for the other in adjacent cafés until the allotted time is nearly up. Norman Barth's 'The Paris Pages' is one of the oldest sites on the Web, and it is still going strong in this very 'here today - gone tomorrow' business.

This year's edition of the Salon du Livre will mark the beginning of my fifth year of online reporting from Paris. I am worn a bit around the edges, quite gray, but still able to stand up and march to the next new thing to see and report about it.

Covering the Salon du Livre single-handedly will produce whatever I can find and memory holes will fill the rest. For the official guff, there is an official site, run by exhibition organizers, Reed-Oip.

This year's country of honor is Québec, which will have 60 of its authors on hand in VO. Surrounded as it is by a really big lot of Anglos, Québec has to produce to maintain its identity and this it does to an extent widely out of proportion to its population.

Books, magazines and multimedia, all at the Salon du Livre, from Friday, 19. March to Saturday, 24. March. At Paris Expo, Porte de Versailles. In the big Hall 1. Open daily from 10:00 to 19:00; on Tuesday, 23. March until 22:00. Entry: 30 francs; kids under 12, free.

See the first issue of a new city and regional magazine from an area of France that may be unfamiliar to you because you are not sure if it isn't in Belgium. Titled 'Hors Les Murs-Lille,' it is pretty slick, and you are directed to the section called, 'La Beauté est dans la Rue.'

France's census starts today. If you want to know more about why we are being counted, by whom and how, the INSEE statistics unit has the answers.

Artists, designers and programmers are invited to sign up - until 31. May - to enter their Web sites, especially if they involve themes of UNESCO interest. There are two categories for entries; 'anything goes' and anything that could qualify a site for an '.Org' registration. There's two prizes of US$5,000 each at stake.

This will be the subject of a debate at the Web Bar in Paris on Wednesday, 10. March at 20:30 CET. I think this will involve a 'live retransmission.' Get details of this and the program from Psycho-Net or from another Web site. If you are in Paris, the address is 32. Rue de Picardie, Paris 3. Near métro République or Temple.

My head was so full of impressionistic stuff and nonsense last week that I forgot to mention the wonderful response from readers who took the time to send Metopole 'Happy Birthday' messages.