Nothing can prepare you for the scale of the Frankfurt
Book Fair. Its 10 enormous hangar-like halls cover 172,000 square metres
– and if you think in terms of Royal Albert Halls (who doesn’t?) that’s
almost 30 of them. With its walkways, travelators and towers, its sleek,
curved, glass fronted buildings, and its open-air square complete with
artificial stream and cute arched bridges, it looks like one of those
miniature architectural model designs for a “city of the future”. Except,
obviously, without the miniature part.
Frankfurt – a financial power-house of a city on the grand river Main
(pronounced “Mine”) – has had a hand in the book business for centuries.
Historians believe that manuscripts were bought and sold there as early as
the 11th century, while in the 15th Century – when the printing press was
invented - European printers and publishers began floating their books to
Frankfurt in watertight barrels in order to trade them. It wasn’t until
1949, though, that the modern book fair was born, breaking free from the
controlling, propagandist regime of the Third Reich. Today it’s the biggest
book and media fare in the world, housing 7,448 exhibitors from 108
countries, who are displaying 400,000 products to around 300,000 visitors.
Every facet of publishing is here, and walking through the halls you find your
head spinning with often-surreal images: a huge poster advertising a book
called Homeopathy for Your Horse; a short, rotund, mustachioed man
playing flamenco guitar to a group of Spanish editors; Fay Weldon nesting
happily on “Das Blaue Sofa” for a TV interview; a stylish enclave for manga
publisher Tokyopop (key title: Rockin’ Heaven: Teen’s Premier Love Beat)
occupied by four balding, bespectacled, middle-aged men; Bob Der Baumeister
(guess!) grinning out at you from a looming cardboard cut-out; a Portuguese
publisher scoffing an enormous bag of crisps.
What are all these people doing here? Traditionally, publishers would come to
sell their titles to booksellers, but now that catalogues can be downloaded,
emails exchanged, and contracts renewed electronically, there is little need
to meet. Fair director Juergen Boos often asks exhibitors and visitors why
they still come: “They come to talk to printers, find illustrators, sell
rights, buy rights, talk about freedom of speech . . .” But couldn’t they do
all that over email? “I don’t know how long your emails are, but mine are
quite short. We are receiving so much electronic information that there is
even more need to meet face-to-face, and there are so many opportunities
here: you probably wouldn’t go to Peru for a meeting, for example, but there
are Peruvian publishers here. This industry needs to talk, and we are a
talking person’s festival.”
More than anything, though, this a market-place for rights: publishers are
here to sell foreign rights for their books, perhaps picking up a couple of
promising titles for themselves at the same time; and literary agents are
here to do what they always do: sell their clients’ works for the highest
price possible, to as many different people as possible.
Every year there are a few hyped books that cause waves of excitement through
the fair. “Everybody talks about ‘the buzz’” Ben Yarde-Buller, MD of the
young independent publisher Old
Street Publishing, told me in the crowded bar of the glamorous
Frankfurter Hof hotel – where much of the real after-hours business happens
– in the early hours of Friday morning. Ben had just a few days before the
book fair acquired a previously self-published novel from the heavyweight
William Morris agency: The Passenger by Billy Cowie, a strange,
short, moving story in which a man communicates with his sister who – a
“foetus in fetu” – is living inside him. It was too late to put the book in
his catalogues, so Ben ran off a couple of print-outs and brought them
along. He talked to a handful of scouts and foreign publishers about the
novel “and the first night of the fair here in the bar somebody tapped me on
the shoulder and said ‘What is this book I am hearing this buzz about?’ Now
we’ve got a long list of people who want to read it! It’s fantastic.” Of
course, the buzz that comes from the celebrity memoirs is more of a
deafening drone: the ghosted memories of Roger Moore, Keith Richards and
Jerry Hall are all up for grabs this week, for typically enormous sums (bids
for Moore are expected to reach £2m).
It’s Ben’s second fair, and he clearly finds it an invaluable way of doing
business. Others, however, are less enthusiastic: a senior sales manager for
a big British publishing house told me that Frankfurt has become “a complete
waste of time and money. No real deals are actually struck at the fair any
more, and we would meet all these people anyway. The serendipitous chance
encounter is a complete myth. Everybody keeps doing it just because nobody
wants to be the first to pull out.”
It’s true that the daily business here is not always glamorous – publishers
are often crammed around little tables, holding one 15-minute meeting after
an other, repeating the same well-worn sales pitches all day. Lunch breaks
are frowned upon and trips to the lavatory have to be carefully planned.
Even the agents (who are usually blessed with a higher ego-rating than
publishers) have to suffer the humiliation of sharing a big, open-plan hall,
and are forced to lean across their desks to maintain a semblance of
confidentiality. (Their pigeon-holes line the wall: the same, slightly
pathetic handwritten note had been stuffed into all of them: “I am a Mexican
publisher interested in being represented by you at
USA . . .”)
But many people maintain that the inspirational “Frankfurt encounter” is not a
myth: Juergen Boos described bumping into an old publisher friend, and
telling him that the Dalai Lama’s sister is at the fair: “ ‘Oh wow!’ he
said. ‘I must talk to her – I want her story!’ So now he is chasing her
through the fair.” And in odd corners of the labyrinthine site, people from
all over the world are making small but valuable connections. In the comics
zone Yukio Tomioka from Tokyo publisher Hakusensha
sits in front of a wall of manga books, the covers showing cute saucer-eyed
high-school girls and moody goths brandishing guns. They are all in
Japanese, Yukio tells me – through his interpreter – and he’s here to find
publishers to translate them. “In the last few years manga have become
increasingly popular outside Asia – now our books are being translated into
all the major European languages. Frankfurt is the only book fair outside
Japan that we go to: here we can meet all our established customers and make
some new ones too.”
Jeroen Schierenberg from Amsterdam
is selling a very different sort of book on his stall in the antiquarian
book market: A “monstrum leonium” glares out from behind a glass case, in a
1550s edition of Historia Animilium - yours for 14,300 Euro. It’s
only the third year of Frankfurt’s rare books trade, and Jeroen has come
back in the hope of repeating the success of last year, when the government
of a major Arab country signed up as a lucrative customer (he won’t say
which country in case one of his rivals poaches them).
So, Frankfurt Book Fair does seem to create business and build networks –
especially after 5 o’clock, when bottles start appearing, and the fair
becomes a sea of little parties, to which anybody and everybody is invited.
The infamous 79-year-old sex therapist Dr Ruth
gave me her phone number at the Wiley stand; I drank whisky with the Scots
and XXXX with the Aussies, and was trampled in a sea of middle-aged men
lunging for fancy cakes in the champagne-sodden French aisle.
At the Frankfurt Book Fair, the entire publishing world is at your
finger-tips. And as long as the presses keep printing, and the agents keep
dealing, and the rights keep selling and the corks keep uncorking, it seems
that people will keep coming back. And back. And back.
