Calcutta, Dec. 12  :    Calcutta, Dec. 12 :  Five minutes to eight, it's pack-up time at Academy of Fine Arts, where the 10-day-long British Book Fair draws to a quiet close. Aveek Sen, a middle-aged visitor lingering around the stalls, rues: 'It was only today that I got to know of this book fair. And that too, by chance'. The low profile kept by the 3rd British Book Fair in Calcutta seems to be one of the reasons for its inability to attract visitors. With over 14 major publishers presenting thousands of fiction and non-fiction titles at a 10 per cent discount, the turnout was lesser than expected. Harish Gullani of Octopus India (a Delhi-based distributor of British books) says: 'Being one of the conveners of the Calcutta Book Fair, I know how crazy Calcuttans are about books. We have about four million visitors to the Calcutta Book Fair every day. But here, we had about 1,500 visitors, of which a maximum of 20 per cent actually made purchases. If we had a large banner outside or given more attention to publicity, we might have fared better.' The book fair, launched way back in 1992 in Mumbai, has been subsequently held in some of the major cities across India - Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi, Calcutta, Bangalore, Coimbatore, Kochi and Pune. The objective of holding this exclusive fair is to create greater awareness of the availability of a wide range of British publications in local markets and promote the existing range of Indian reprints of British books. There were stalls in every gallery of the Academy and visitors could browse in more comfort than at the city book fair on the Maidan. Some of the stalls had apparently done much better than the others 'because they were able to cater to public tastes,' said a British Council spokesman. Vikram Tanna of Timely Book Centre said: 'We sold a lot of fiction titles, like Ruskin Bond and Satyajit Ray, but our Addison Wesley Computer books were the major rage.' At India Book House too, K. Babu said their sales were greater than at the 1996 and the 1998 fairs. Devika Chatterjee, publicity in-charge of Oxford University Press, said: 'OUP always sells well, in spite of the escalating prices of books. We did rather well with dictionaries and Oxford India paperbacks.' Cambridge University Press has also sold a number of Cambridge low-priced edition school books and Indian reprints. One highlight of the fair was, in fact, a reprint. J.R. Family Learning Pvt. Ltd brought out the first Indian reprint of Gray's Anatomy, a seminal work for medical students. Screening of two British films and a lecture on 'Digital Libraries' were some of the other attractions at the fair.