by Lydia Stryk
Riding the train to the small city of Darmstadt to sleep over with a friend after a day spent at the Frankfurt Book Fair, I observed an impeccably dressed elderly gentleman sitting several rows away from me across the aisle.
He wore an elegant calf-length overcoat which men of a certain class in Germany are partial to wearing. His shoes were fine leather and shining. He was tall, with excellent posture, a full mane of white hair and the bluest of eyes, which I noted because they reminded me of my father’s eyes and because they were staring into the beyond behind me. He was in possession of a large expensive-looking wrist watch to which he turned his attention occasionally. And though I could see no evidence of a briefcase, his would have been top of the line.
He had, in fact, the air of a publisher of tasteful literary titles on his way home from a successful but tiring day at the fair. And I pictured him the sort who would have attended the fair every year without exception until the pandemic temporarily shut it down and would continue to attend, out of habit, for as long as he was able. Perhaps, he was the scion of a publishing empire, I told myself, a fitting story.
It had been a long day, and I was happy to be on the train. Nothing else about the day had been happy, so eventually my mind wandered away from the old man to my own state of affairs. I was cold and hungry and admittedly forlorn, none of this conducive to conjecture and true curiosity. I closed my eyes.
And that is when a certain commotion broke out on the until-that-moment quiet and peaceable train. Concerned women’s voices could be heard, and I opened my eyes to find the concern centered around the elegant elderly man. My station was approaching and though readying to disembark, I was able to make out the following: The elderly gentleman had apparently turned to his seat companion and asked her where the train was heading and if she could tell him where he was. Upon questioning, it became clear that he did not know where he wanted to go. The literary lion of my imagination had presumably boarded a train with no direction or purpose and was lost.
Leave it to women to take a lost man under their wing. The group now hovering over him had made the decision to call ahead to the next large station and put him back on a train to Frankfurt. But the Darmstadt stop had arrived, and I left him to his fate.
*
Picture a convention center of the kind insulting the landscape across the globe; three floors of cavernous, windowless, inescapable halls times three and in each hall of three floors, an arcane numerical system guiding visitors through the jerry-built stands and small stages. A dreary courtyard containing a tented area and an assortment of unsavory food trucks complete the picture. Imagine books confronting you at every turn; an assault of books and images of books plastered on temporary walls, a glut of titles and blurbs, glaring book covers and the uncomfortable photographs of writers blown up out of all proportion, monstrous and seemingly troubled by their surroundings; and the books, themselves, splayed across folding tables and crammed into temporary shelving from floor to ceiling; replaceable and worthless if the sellers fail to convince the buyers otherwise.
Cast your eyes from the books and observe the people of the fair. The trades persons, slightly dominated in numbers by women. You might be surprised by their appearance. The clothes are chic with just the right touch of the casual. Designer outfits and gym shoes abound. Armani jackets and jeans. Then spot yourself in a mirror, frayed cuffs hidden under a borrowed jacket (but your sneakers are new). Backpack hoisted on your shoulders, worn by time and use. And inside that backpack, several copies of your novel, recently published in the US by a small press, but you are greedy for a larger audience. It is your goal to convince UK and German editors and publishers to take a look—but why stop there? Publishers from the world over are here and the world is your oyster.
But what on earth were you thinking?
The buyers and sellers, otherwise known as editors, publishers, as well as press reps, directors of rights and agents are huddled in animated discussions at small tables wherever you turn. Enthusiasm for the latest titles dominates the aisles, broken only by the unabated schedule of appointments. The writer observes a slight hysteria behind the veneer and the occasional sign of exhaustion. Everyone here is very busy with no time to lose with one true goal in mind– survival. Unspoken but palpable is the underlying dread that the publishing industry is near collapse. Given the lightening-speed changes in technology as well as the surge in indie publishing, to say that the traditional book business is under stress is an understatement.
And here is the point where I must disappoint my readers. Because to tell you the truth, to be perfectly honest, I have no idea what the book people were saying to each other. Try as hard as I might to listen in, they keep their tones hushed and just below the reach of curious ears; a presumably practiced tone of secrecy. My hunch from the snatches I was able to garner is that books are discussed like any other product at a market. But I can’t tell you more than that.
Because the combined loudness of all of these quietly held secretive conversations in the echoing halls is deafening.
Pity the poor authors, then, who are scheduled by their publishers for a reading slot at one of the innumerable reading nooks across the fair. The readers do their best but you just can’t compete with the overwhelming din and bustle. Whether cookbook authors or poets, fantasy writers or historians, they all share one overriding trait, that of looking utterly miserable and out of place, and they disappear from their half-hour turn, shoulders hunched, defeated. It’s painful to witness but at least it is recognizable. Very different from the hyperbole of sales pitching and gung-ho presentation surrounding them. You are witnessing the human condition of humiliation but it’s comfortingly human, nonetheless.
It’s not that I hadn’t been warned. I had been warned not to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair by everyone with any knowledge of the book industry. A pained expression crossed their brows when I mentioned my plan. It isn’t for writers, they said. Don’t go with any expectations, they urged. And yet, large as life on the book fair website, writers are invited (for a small fortune) to attend the first three ‘professional’ days of the book fair before it is opened to the general public.* And so I chose not to heed the warnings. A certain cockiness or desperation propelled me towards my own annihilation, as Freud might speculate. I had written a novel, after all, and writing it had taken years of my life. Surely it was worthy of attention.
*
A little background. The Frankfurt Book Fair is the biggest international book marketplace in the world. Beth Driscoll and Claire Squires, two scholars of the publishing world who have written a playful analysis of the fair, have described it as the most important date on the publishing calendar.
The industry gathers there once a year chiefly to buy and sell book rights. In 2022, the Fair boasted (according to their website): 93,000 trade visitors from 121 countries, 6,400 media representatives from 63 countries, 4,000 exhibitors from 95 countries, 2,330 events for trade visitors and the general public, 1,608 rights-selling companies on Frankfurt Rights from 135 countries and 170,834 titles on Frankfurt Rights.
Perhaps a few of you are as overwhelmed by these figures as I am. I can tell you that Frankfurt Rights is the licensing company owned and operated by the Book Fair, itself, though agencies in the US and China both own minor shares. I can tell you this because it is on their website, not because I understand it. As a writer, I should brush up on the issue of book rights, some of you might be thinking. It’s shameful how little creatives understand their own business, I hear you saying. And while we’re on the subject, you can’t help pointing out, it’s hard and often thankless work selling literature, cut us some slack.
The Fair is also quite a party, if you can believe the stories.
Driscoll and Squires, who went undercover as journalists at the fair, have described its ‘carnivalesque’ quality after participating in after-hour events and parties, the most excessive of which are sponsored by the biggest publishers. Invitations and attendance, what else is new, are “intimately linked to the circles of influence and power.”
“Partying, then, is a crucial element of Buchmesse buzzness,” they tell us. Most interesting is their observation that the book fair buzz at parties “is around the ‘cool’ publishers or literary agencies, rather than around individual books or their authors.” Books and writers are apparently tossed to the wind after hours.
As for the Book Fair’s history, according to Peter Weidhaas, who ran the Frankfurt Book Fair for twenty-five years and has written an historical account, it appears that Johannes Gutenberg, inventor of the printing press, attended in 1454. But even before the printed word, evidence suggests that hand-written texts were bought and sold there going back at least to 1370. But it doesn’t stop there. Weidhaas can point to the sale of books at a fair in the city dating back to the twelfth century!
And the Frankfurt Book Fair comes and goes over the centuries, influenced by wars and plagues and politics and cultural rivalries and rises out of the ashes of the book burnings that consumed Germany starting on May 10th of 1933—that mad, calculated act to cleanse Germany of Jewish and progressive thought (because books are ideas in the end) set in motion by Adolf Hitler, who himself was an avid even obsessive reader (as well as popular author), it turns out, of virulent pseudo-scientific literature by antisemites and racists, among them eugenicists and purveyors of the occult, whose works have been best-sellers over the ages and the primary influencers of some of our darkest chapters since the advent of literature, a fact that can’t be overlooked when we think about booksellers and books.
The Book Fair rose out of the ashes, as I said, in 1949, in a newly democratic West Germany, bent on a new start (and a certain distancing and forgetting, as some critics describe it) with fresh democratic impulses and a euphoric culture of debate and has continued its steadfast international path through times of bloody wars and student revolts, the Red Army Fraction and reunification, cultural tumult without end and a new plague, to this day.
But perhaps it is best to let the Fair speak for itself as to how it views itself today, its importance and its values.
Our Values
Frankfurter Buchmesse is a meeting place for publishers, authors, literature and culture fans …from all over the world… [and]thrives on the diversity and internationality of its exhibitors and visitors, as well as the exchange among these in an open dialogue.
Our Code of Conduct
Frankfurter Buchmesse stands for respect, diversity and tolerance. We celebrate our wide range of different participants whom we engage at eye level in open dialogue. Learn about our rules for an appreciative atmosphere of collaboration at the fair.
*
If you are a writer attending the Frankfurt Book Fair with the hope of talking to the book people, be prepared to outsmart or charge past the mostly stylish young women gatekeepers posted like sentries at the entrance to the larger publishers’ presentation stalls. Otherwise, you’re not going to get very far. You won’t meet a single professional. However, it is my experience that if you attempt a break-through or happen to catch an individual off-guard you might meet a number of them with the following success. The following three instances sum up my experience of attending the Frankfurt Book Fair pretty well.
I have mentioned how full the schedules appeared, how busy meeting each other everybody was, but walking the halls, I noticed a man sitting alone at the table of a respected world press. I took my chance. In a sea of white faces on the European floor, this rotund man had an air of jollity and appeared to be of non-European descent. Most promising of all, he did not look away when I approached. Buoyed on, I asked him if I could sit down and talk to him for a moment at which he mumbled something I took to be a yes. I sat down on the hard chair and introduced myself, taking my book out of my backpack at the same time and began to tell this receptive man why I thought my novel might be worthy of a world publisher. To give credit where credit is due, he listened, to a point. And then with a polite if cooling demeanour, he slowly and carefully told me this: “You are wasting my time and you are wasting your time. Nothing you say to me will help you publish your novel” –and then this: “You are the eighth writer who has approached me about their book this morning.”
Eight writers before lunch! This was news, indeed! I wasn’t alone. I swallowed hard, unsure how to take this new piece of information. Had I really assumed I was the only writer to have shown up at the fair? As we were still seated, and I still appeared to have his ear, I let the book professional know that it was important for writers to come and to be heard and perhaps among the eight was a book that was worthy of his attention. But by then he was standing up and stretching his hand out warmly to greet his next appointment. In less than an instant, I had been wiped clean from his consciousness.
I have not mentioned that it was a big day in British political history. By early afternoon, the news filtered in that Liz Truss had just resigned! I took this as a chance to address various UK book people I was passing on my continual rounds of the book fair halls–and with some success. The British at the fair were variously euphoric at the quick and sudden demise of this unpopular prime minister and willing to exchange a word or two. I spied a woman seated alone at a table with a friendly expression and sauntered over to offer my congratulations, and we had a healthy human exchange about the state of British politics. She even let slip that she was an associate publisher at the important press whose stall she was seated in, and so I took my chance and mentioned that I was a writer and wondered if I could– at which point she lifted her hand in front of my face in a gesture I hope to forget one day and cried out “Stop!”. Indeed, I was stopped by the shock of the gesture. “Don’t say anymore,” she went on, “there’s no reason for you to continue. I will not look at your book, and I am sorry if this seems unfriendly, but you have to understand.” “But you seemed so friendly …” I managed, near tears. “I am sorry,” she said, lifting her shoulders with a sigh, ushering me out of her space.
You might assume I would have given up by now, but sometimes sheer demoralization spurs you on to dig an even deeper hole in your self-worth. I stopped off at the stall of another well-known and discriminating smallish press where someone I took to be an editor (something about her glasses and proprietary manner) was seated in a meeting with a presumable buyer. Their talk appeared to be coming to an end. I went through the motions of studying the shelves of books and the publisher’s fancy catalogue, though my heart wasn’t in it, and waited for the buyer to disappear. Alone at last in the stall with the editor, I introduced myself as a writer and asked her if I might take a moment of her time. Her response was swift and not friendly, at all, which in some way set her apart from the others. “I’m not here to talk to writers,” she said, glancing in my general direction. “That’s not what we’re doing here. There’s a protocol for that and you can find it on our website. I’m sorry but I have another appointment.” She turned back to her laptop and that might have been the end of it, but I had reached my limit. “You wouldn’t be here without us,” I murmured. “There is a time and place for everything,” she answered, without looking up, “and this isn’t it.”
At which point, I gave up, gave in, succumbed to the reality I was facing. I had made a dreadful mistake, broken a taboo, committed a crime. The double crime of hubris and naivety.
The relief I felt at this epiphany was immense. I treated myself to a wildly over-priced ice cream and let myself be shooed away like a fly by stylish gatekeepers at several of the larger presses with a laugh and a knowing nod.
***
*Since writing this piece, the Frankfurt Book Fair has for the first time placed a cautionary note to writers who attend the fair on their website. I like to think my presence may have played a small part.