SIBF 2025 displays UAE heritage books

In a fairground of glossy new book releases, LED-lit banners and digital storytelling workshops, one stall at the ongoing 44th Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF) seems to hum to a different rhythm, literally.

- Gulf Today, Staff Reporter

As you walk past exhibit U14, what will get to you first is the soft crackle of an old photo floating through the air, playing an Egyptian classic by the timeless Abdel Halim Hafez. The scent of aging paper lingers as visitors step closer, drawn not by bright displays but by the sepia-tinted quiet nostalgia of a time gone by.

Stacked in neat but timeworn piles, New Azbakya is less a stall and more a portal, or perhaps a museum, that serves as a carefully assembled time capsule of the Arab world's cultural memory.

Its shelves are heavy with timewarped magazines, black-and-white photographs and framed yellowed newspapers from another century. On one side, cassette tapes and postcards from Cairo's golden age of cinema spill out of wooden crates. On another, English, French, and Italian paperbacks peek at you from a tranche of Arabic bestsellers from the mid-20th century.