All the fun of the fair

Last week’s annual book fair in Frankfurt—the famous Buchmesse—is the biggest such event in the world. For a city with a population of 750,000 residents, it’s a very big deal, nudging the book fair in London, with a population twelve times larger, into second place.

In fact, during the fair, Frankfurt’s population is said to grow by about a quarter, drawing in some 120,000 trade visitors from 130 countries and a similar number of members of the public at what is one of Germany’s most popular live cultural events.

Mind you, Frankfurt is not as big as it was. Teams, Zoom and other miracles of communication technology mean that business that once had to be conducted face to face can now be carried out at long distance. And people notice. This Wirtshaus used to be packed with foreigners during Book Week, the landlord told me at the village inn near where I was staying in. Now look, he added: it’s just you.

That said, when you’re inside the cluster of vast halls that make up the Fair, shortage of numbers is not what strikes you. What strikes you is the deafening level of talking and selling and chatter. By the end of each day, your vocal cords are drained and so is your energy. During the time I was there representing EnvelopeBooks, I did a total of 40,000 steps. My normal daily average: about 2,500.

Things eventually settled down but for the first day—Wednesday 7 October—regular attenders were wrong-footed by a last-minute relocation of the exhibition stands. The ground water had dried out during the long heatwave of the summer, and cracks started appearing in Hall Six, the one that usually accommodates British and American publishers.

Last-minute rearrangements were carried out, but Google’s bots seemed not to have noticed, and over the course of the first morning, visitors were said to be turning up fifteen minutes late for meetings because exhibitors were not where they were said to be.

What does a publishing meeting look like? The basic format is two, three or maybe four people sitting round a table, discussing rights, but the actual settings can range from the monster installations that house the biggest publishers or national collectives of publishers, often with space for fifty or more simultaneous meetings, down to the little ma-and-pa operations in tiny booths.

These are the spaces that publishers, sales reps, agents, printers, illustrators and authors (yes, those too) trudge to over the three days assigned to business-to-business meetings, and that become, for 30 minutes at a time, the shrines at which the most earnest hopes are offered up.

To the relief of all, however, at the end of the day, the dynamic of the halls starts to change as the incentive to make just one more deal gives way to the urge for a drink. Very often this is where the magic of the Buchmesse begins, in those chance meetings over a glass of wine hosted by the big hitters and by government agencies.

Canada and France know how to hold a good party, as do Italy and the Nordic countries. Korea is the beneficiary of public investment in K-Books, and the party staged by Czechia, this year’s “Guest of Honour”, left many visitors happy.

But most memorable party was that of Brazil, where no one seemed to care that kicking-out time had slipped by, and where a guitarist went on playing gentle bossa novas while commissioning editors and their assistants knocked back cachaça and soft-stepped the evening away. That’s the way to do it.