People throng the fair from 11:00am in the morning and there was hardly any space at the fair venue for the visitors to stand for a moment.

The long queues from the entrance trailed back to Shahbagh, the High Court and Central Shaheed Minar. But the crowd management by the law enforcers was better, many visitors remarked.

A number of visitors went back seeing the long queues. Some of them opted to visit Little Book Fair at the Public Library organised by some publishers who were not allocated stalls at the Ekushey book fair.

The stall owners were happy about the sales. Until yesterday, a total of 1048 new titles hit the fair against about 1450 in the corresponding period last year, according to Bangla Academy Public Relations Office sources.

These books include 222 novels, 21 books on juvenile literature, 112 on short stories and 220 on poetry.

The publishers brought out more titles yesterday. The fair information centre reported the arrival of 138 titles till 6:00pm. And the publishers said more books would be coming at night.

Translations are also selling well this year. A large number of publishers brought out translations of famous books, mainly novels.

Novels top the buyers' list, followed by poetry, said Osman Gani of Agamee Prakashani. "But there are also some serious readers who like critical writings and books on serious subjects", he added.

A number of litterateurs visited the fair yesterday. The stall attendants at Anyaprakash found it tough to manage the fans of Humayun Ahmed as he came to the fair for the first time to release his novel Madhyanna.

Muhammad Zafar Iqbal roamed around, followed by hundreds of young fans. The tired writer sat on the stairs of the Burwan House and gave autographs.

Ekushey Bangla Prakashan brought out poet Al Mahmud's autobiographic write-up 'Bichurna Ainay Kabir Mukh'.

Publishing house Oitijhya will bring out complete collection of Joy Bangla, the official bulletin of the expatriate government of Bangladesh during the liberation war published from Mujibnagar.

Very few stalls followed the instruction of not selling books published by other houses. The trouble over the implementation of this rule continued.

Bangla Academy held a discussion on form and content of pomes by Abu Hena Mostafa Kamal. Bishwajit Ghosh read out the keynote paper while Asad Chowdhury, Khaled Hossain and Hosne Ara also participated in the discussion chaired by Maniruzzaman.

The academy will hold the primary-round of recitation and song competition by children today.