I followed two literature lovers into the Frankfurt Book Fair last month. That doesn’t seem so unlikely at first glance: the Buchmesse, celebrating its 60th anniversary this year, is the oldest gathering of its kind, and the biggest. A good place to find serious readers, then – and this couple matched all my stereotypes: his hair was limp and long; she was dressed in earth tones; they kissed on the escalator taking us from the U-Bahn to the Messe, in a sort of ebullient celebration of what they were about to enter. But they weren’t what I’d expected to see. Reports from Frankfurt like to remind bibliophiles that this is merely a trade fair – a place for copyrights to be bought and sold – not a gathering ground for readers falling in love all over again, be it with books or each other. Indeed, later in the day, when I spotted my couple for the second time, waiting for a lecture about the role of the novel in the world today, they were engaged in something I wouldn’t see anyone else doing in the first 72 hours of the whole extravaganza: they were each reading a book.
If readers are in short supply, there are book producers aplenty. To the crowds of sallow, exhausted editors, agents, publicity teams and rights managers arriving at the event straight from early-morning flights and following a night of Man Booker Prize parties in London, the fair’s layout must have been disorienting. Were they seeing double or was this the airport all over again? The fair’s central terminal – a bigger, bulkier pastiche of Santiago Calatrava’s building in Bilbao – hosts the German-language trade publishing houses; the English-speaking zone has been shunted into one of the less pleasant hangars. The control tower stand-in is the 256ft Messeturm, which, when it was completed in 1991, was Europe’s tallest building. Frankfurt got into the trade-fair business back in medieval times and has been hosting book fairs since Gutenburg, but this particular iteration was brought to life as a postwar effort to rebuild Germany.
The rented space increased by 1.4 per cent this year from last, according to the fair’s director, Juergen Boos, a fortysomething German with a daring centre parting. This expansion of territory – across eight massive, two- and three-floored halls – was despite a slight drop in the number of exhibitors, from 7,448 in 2007 to 7,373. More space, fewer stands – yet it still seemed unbelievably packed. I had never been to the fair before, but when I first entered Hall 3, full of German trade publishers, a flood of nostalgia hit me: the stands displaying books I couldn’t read, the chocolates and cookies handed out at each stall, the friendly but weary professionals ready to show off their wares – all this was just like the American Accounting Association meetings that my father took me to in the summers of my childhood.
It’s a cliché of the fair that the most important deals are made after hours, in the bars and at the parties, or ahead of the fair, or after it, but you wouldn’t guess it from the back-to-back half-hour meetings the professionals schedule from 10am to 6pm every day. The German-language halls are leavened by the occasional reading or political debate, but the English zone feels like all business, all the time.
The halls of the messe are arranged in a constellation that looks like a sickle, and, in the centre of the courtyard, a tent had been set up to show off Turkish cultural fare. Turkey, you see, was the guest of honour this year. A crowd had gathered round an artist at work on ebru, or traditional Turkish paper marbling; another, slightly bigger crowd was waiting for free Turkish coffee on offer.
Next year’s guest of honour is China, and I’m hoping for something akin to the grandeur of the Olympics opening ceremony in Frankfurt. Presumably the Beijing smog will have prepared the performers for the clouds of cigarette smoke outside Hall 4. On Thursday morning, at a press preview of China’s plans for its role in the spotlight, Chen Yingming, vice-director of the Department of Foreign Communication and Exchange and director of the Organising Committee Office of China as the Guest of Honour at the Frankfurt Book Fair 2009 (the Germans have 12 months to turn that into one very long word) joined me in comparing Frankfurt ’09 with Beijing ’08. The book fair, Chen said, was “the Olympics of the publishing industry”. I suppose ... but only if the television cameras at the Olympics were focused not on the athletic events but on, say, the debate over whether gymnasts should be judged on the old 10-point scale or a new, qualitative measure; or on agreements between coaches to send one country’s athletes to another country’s track meeting the next year; or on Michael Phelps’s contract negotiations with the makers of Wheaties.
. . .
Just because your business is culture, it doesn’t mean the business of it – the deals struck, the industry gossip – should be interesting to outsiders. None of the rest of us really cares that X editor, not Y, finally persuaded Z author to sign a contract with him. If anything, our interest is wrapped up in how much money Z – that poseur we remember from university – actually earned in the deal.
And yet much time and conversation at Frankfurt this year was devoted to a technical development that really could affect readers: the eBook. The idea – an iPod-like device on to which you can download books – has been around for at least a decade, but Sony’s eReader and Amazon’s Kindle are the first contraptions that offer a reading experience close to that of settling down with a book.
I scoured the halls looking for electronic readers and eventually discovered stall D437, Hall 4.2, where a mustachioed American unwrapped a test-drive Kindle. It’s about the size of a hardback book, and no heavier. More important, after reading a page or two on it, my eyes didn’t hint at that dry, bulging feeling you get from staring at a computer screen. The Sony machine offers the same benefits and looks even slicker – like an electronic Moleskine notebook. I feel rather excited about eBooks, despite a £200 asking price and the Kindle not yet being available in Europe, and I’m not alone. At a party on Wednesday, an editor with German publisher Kiepenhauer & Witsch ran to grab his briefcase when I said I’d yet to see an eReader. “It’s the first time teenagers have approached me on the subway and asked what I’m reading,” he raved.
If editors and agents are enchanted by the eReaders, executives seem considerably less so. Stephanie Van Duin, head of strategy at Hachette Livre, spent a panel discussion rolling her eyes and grimacing whenever the subject of eBook pricing came up. At another panel, three publishing executives, from HarperCollins, Lagardere and Penguin (part of Pearson, which also owns the FT), all shook their heads when asked if they read eBooks regularly – before two of the three admitted they used them when travelling or reading manuscripts. If you’re the head of an international publishing house, I’d think that constituted “regularly”.
Still, Michael Cader, who moderated that panel, doesn’t think eBooks are going to do to the book industry what the iPod did to music. Cader owns a book packaging business but is better known for his website, Publishers Marketplace, and blog, Publishers Lunch. Ebooks are good for people in publishing, he told me, because they have to read a lot of manuscripts, and there’s little question that a slim, electronic device beats an unwieldy pile of A4 paper. But the machines have a long way to go before regular readers switch over. By and large, Cader is unimpressed by the response of the publishers to technological change. One of his panel members had described building a virtual infrastructure that is a mirror image of his company’s physical infrastructure, but Cader argues that digital publishing is “a different paradigm, a different set of relationships, a different way of doing business”.
Amazon is quietly acquiring small companies – such as Audible.com, which sells audio books, and Shelfari, on which users catalogue the books they’ve read – to knit together a larger enterprise, something unlike any of the old publishing models. But publishers are still resisting giving the marketplace what it wants. “It’s still a book business,” Cader said, “and it needs to become a reader business.”
I saw his point at the weekend, when the fair opens to the public. By 10.30am on Saturday, still a day before most of the books went on sale, the walkways between the halls were packed. In this crowd, I kept seeing elaborately costumed teenagers. After passing dozens of elves with powdered-white faces, pixies in combat boots and bright blue wigs, dragons, insects, demons and angels, I stopped two girls dressed as sailors – but with the luxurious red tails of human-size foxes swishing behind them. Sarah, from Cologne, explained that all of these fancy-dress creatures were part of a movement called Cosplay, popular with people anywhere from age 12 to age 30. They dress up as their favourite characters in Japanese Manga comics and meet at events like the book fair. Had Sarah come just for the comics stands? “No, also for the books,” she said. “And for the different cultures. I want to learn about Turkey, the guest of honour country, and others.”
. . .
The only self-published author I met at the fair was Georg Oswald Cott. Cader had told me that this was just the kind of person to whom the publishing industry should be responding, and fast. “The single largest growth area is self-publishing; publishers interested in growth and responding to customers should be figuring out how to license their servies and brands to these people,” Cader said. “Traditional publishers still see themselves as the gatekeepers. They believe their selection matters, though in the marketplace, it rarely does.” Cott had set up a yellow folding chair between halls 4 and 5 and was handing out free copies of his poems – scrawled on small pieces of paper rolled into scrolls and tied with yarn. He was moving a lot of product. “Poetry is a fundamental genre,” he said, then asked me where I was from.
“The US.”
“My son lived in America. In Alaska. In the winter, the wolves come out and in the summer the grizzly bears come out.” Had he seen the Werner Herzog film about the man who lived with bears? As with every German with whom I’ve ever discussed Herzog, his answer was disappointing: “I haven’t seen the movie. I have seen the bears.” No regret detected. Maybe it’s harder to recognise a madman genius when he’s also your countryman.
Poetry was not much on the minds of the publishing crowd at the fair. It barely makes any money in its original tongue, let alone through foreign-rights sales. Still, when Anselm Kiefer, who won this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair Peace Prize, spoke to the press, he said that literature and poetry “are the only answer for me, in life”. Kiefer, who looks like Ed Harris looking like Jackson Pollock, said peace, for him, was an empty room waiting to be filled up, not the “graveyard peace” of Goethe’s Abendlied.
Wasn’t Kiefer rather negative, asked one journalist? Ever since the 2006 Fifa World Cup, Germany has been proud again – but Kiefer keeps painting destruction. The artist politely disagreed: he doesn’t see ruins, devastation, as negative. Rather, they are the beginning of new life.
No one at the fair was yet taking that view about the looming global recession. The hovering prospect of ruin didn’t dent the number of deals struck; the agents and rights managers kept on pitching; the editors kept on buying. Everyone generally agreed with the Random House editor who told me he expected the economy to get much worse, but neither the fair nor the parties were quite in tune with that attitude.
At the Bertelsmann party on Thursday, the biggest for the English publishers, Markus Dohle, the new chief executive of Random House (which is owned by Bertelsmann), stood at the entrance for the first hour and shook the hand of every guest. He comes from the printing division and is expected to bring about cost-cutting across the company. It felt a bit like the grim reaper was standing at the door, but the guests still stormed the sushi room and slurped down champagne merrily. Meanwhile, book sales are down, year on year, in the US, Germany and Britain.
On Friday evening in Hall 5, one of the buildings devoted to foreign publishers – neither German nor English-language – the Japanese section was kicking off a small evening reception at one of the exhibition stands. No sushi here, but instead a sort of hors d’oeuvres version of German Butterbrot – open, cold-cut sandwiches. These cocktail hours bloom all over the fair as each day’s business begins to wind up, a reminder that the publishing world does still manage occasionally to inject old-fashioned charm into low-stakes deal-making.
That’s the trouble, said Sigurdur Svavarsson. “Book fairs are festive places. Book people are used to having fun. We’re doing that with mixed feelings.” Svavarsson, an Icelandic publisher, was standing in his company Opna’s stall, down a stand-studded aisle from the Japanese party. With Iceland in financial ruin thanks to the credit crunch, he and his colleagues were having trouble keeping their minds on the fair. “In the old days, it would have been easier, but now we’re always getting text messages. We’re checking websites all day long.” He glanced back at a colleague, still in a meeting. “There’s a sad undertone to everything these days. The hardest part is that every meeting here begins with someone feeling sorry for you. But you can also see that people, deep inside, are a little bit relieved that this is happening to a small country, not to them, not to someone bigger.”
As for business, Svavarsson echoes what an English agent had said to me the night before about the UK: that even in hard times, people will keep buying books. “The book has a firm status in Iceland,” he said. “The general public in Iceland will cut down on other things before we cut down on books.” It’s his job, then, to make sure they’re there to buy. As the currency collapsed, he had to scramble to pay for books just arriving at the docks. A shipment of coffee-table books showcasing 5,000 years of art was in danger of being sent back to Asia if he couldn’t come up with the money. He secured a line of credit at the last minute.
After the interview, I asked to see a copy of the art book. Svavarsson ushered me to the shelf. There it sat, and next to it another tome: 30 Crazy Things to Do in Iceland.
Rose Jacobs is deputy editor of FT Weekend Magazine
