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Exhibition management company AMK Book Services has put emergency procedures in place to ensure publishers can ship all their equipment back to the UK from the Bologna Children’s Book Fair in the event of a no deal Brexit.
With the UK expected to leave the European Union on 29th March and Bologna Children's Book Fair due to take place just two days later from 1st April - 4th April, AMK has put emergency procedures in place and has export and import clearance brokers ready so that all goods can go through customs.
A no deal Brexit would be a “disaster”, Barbara Williams, director of AMK, told The Bookseller. “We’ve been in discussions with customs brokers and they don’t know any more than we do at this stage and they don’t have the manpower to deal with a no deal situation. Should a no deal happen, every item will have to be checked and cleared through customs. This will lead to delays on lorries and charges that publishers will have to fork out for. We’ve spoken to all the publishers and have told them what to expect. At this stage creating panic is the wrong stage to do but we have to deal with it if it happens.”
Kunak McGann, rights manager at Irish publisher The O’Brien Press, said: “The best case scenario is that we’re looking at extra tariffs and time delays.”
She said luckily Bologna is taking place after London Book Fair this year, so publishers do not have to quickly take their stands down to ship to Italy, as they have done in previous years. “If London was after Bologna it would be a major issue,” McGann said. “As it is we have stock housed with AMK so it will be storied with AMK until Frankfurt, so we have six months to get our stock to Germany if there are delays.”
Tracy Phillips, rights director at Egmont, said she was very grateful to have a European parent company, because Egmont is based in Denmark.
“Our stand and many of our books will be shipped in and out of Copenhagen,” she said. “We do, however, ship proofs and dummies from the UK in advance of the fair and our shipper has asked us to get material earlier this year in case of any Brexit delays.”
However Kate Wilson, Nosy Crow’s m.d., said bringing material back from the show was the least of the publishing industry’s problems.
“I feel so gloomy about the prospect of Brexit, and its longer-term likely impact on the UK economy and on the retail market in particular that the issue of material coming back from Bologna is, I think, the least of our worries,” she said. “It also seems unlikely that the axe will fall during Bologna anyway as there is every chance of an extension. I think that the key things that we bring back are dummies and our records of deals and interest, and we’ll bring them back ourselves in our luggage as usual.”