ARGENTINA:For all those who love to read, who enjoy getting lost in crowds, who are attracted by the idea of a powerful espresso after midnight, who loathe being rushed, who get mildly depressed when reading yet another article prophesying a straight-to-hell future for the printed word - this is the time and the place for you.
Technically, it's morning. But really it's night: the wee hours, at the 33rd annual Buenos Aires International Book Fair, the biggest celebration for bibliophiles in the Spanish-speaking world.
Unlike some international book fairs, this one does not cater to publishing industry types. It caters to readers.
These readers happen to live in one of the world's great nocturnal cities, where cafes do brisk business until dawn on streets named for writers - Jorge Luis Borges, Jose Hernández, Adolfo Bioy Casares, and so on.
Seven minutes after midnight and the entrance to the book fair looks like an amusement park at noon on a Saturday. Chorizo and hamburgers sizzle on sidewalk grills; clowns hand out programmes.
Drum music pulses from a band of unseen street musicians caught somewhere between the thousands of readers leaving the fair and the thousands just arriving.
The publishing industry is shrinking in many countries, but not Argentina.
Since an economic collapse in 2001, the number of new titles published annually here has more than doubled. Argentines are, for the most part, proud of their country's reputation as a literary capital in South America, and they're proud that their book fair is expected to draw well over a million visitors during its two-week run.
It is on nights like this when the fair is at its most quintessentially Argentine, when the national passions for reading and for the night feed into each other, when more than 35,000 pass through the entry gates after 9 pm, most lingering until the red-eyed hours.
At 12.15 am, Argentine writer Alejandro Dolina is speaking to a packed crowd in a lecture hall with a 1,000-person capacity; about 300 more are outside watching a live feed on a video screen.
In the exhibition halls, books are the main attraction - millions of them, displayed by more than 1,500 participating publishers. At one stand, Florencia Cianchetta opens a book by literary icon Julio Cortázar while her boyfriend looks over her shoulder.
"I love to read anything and everything," says Cianchetta (22), a communications student. "We're just browsing now - we haven't bought anything yet."
There's time. It's only 12.30, and the fair won't close until two. At the food stands, some people are just getting around to dinner.
Espresso is flowing freely.
There is an enormously eclectic variety of stands: Arabic books, medical texts, legal tracts, military manuals, comic books.
"Buenos Aires is spectacular, no?" says Noemi Cecchi (38), bumping shoulders with a crowd standing in front of one of the stands.
"It never rests." Observing visitor traffic between 1.15 and 1.45 seems to confirm the statement.
It also encourages stereotyping, rash judgments that are almost certainly imperfect - but fun to make anyway: Argentine doctors are night owls; lawyers are not.
Buddhist texts are engrossing late at night; manuals displayed by Argentina's Institute of Naval Publications - not so much.
Those who like Japanese manga graphic novels don't get enough sleep. Why else should they get so testy when gently questioned by reporters?
But women who accompany their four- and seven-year-old daughters as they browse children's books with titles like Flomenca the Cow at 1.43 am are patient and kind, and they deserve to be spared any harsh judgments about parental discipline, bedtimes etc.
By 1.50, 10 minutes before the close, some readers appear ready to cash in for the evening.
"It makes me so tired," says Angela Suarez (26), a student from Colombia, flipping quietly through a book called How to Make Objects With Pearls. "There's just so many books."
But at the stand for the Imaginador publishing company, the one nearest the exit, people continue to browse up until two.
They read books about face-painting, about meditation, about child-rearing.
At the bottom of one of the shelves, a title boldly jumps off its soft cover: How to Defeat Insomnia, by Alfredo Tensoni.
No one touches it.