Reflections on a First Trip to Frankfurt
By Margaret Raymo -- Publishers Weekly, 10/23/2008
Houghton Mifflin editor Margaret Raymo shares her thoughts as a Frankfurt Book Fair first-timer.
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The crowded aisles of Frankfurt. |
It is a pretty amazing experience to walk through the endless halls, the German one seeming the most interesting with the best architecture, fanciest booths with full bars, and seemingly random celebrations with beer and wine flowing at all times of the day. As in Bologna, I loved scanning the shelves of publishers in different countries as I ran to my next appointment, stopping when a piece of art or unusual format caught my eye. Because Frankfurt is so sprawling, there were halls I didn’t even make it into, so I missed that sense of being able to see what the whole world is doing, which you can actually do in Bologna if you try hard enough.
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Meetings at the fair. |
And in terms of what folks were selling, it was definitely the year of the pop-up. Sabuda has started a tsunami of pop-ups from around the world similar to how Rowling kicked off the fantasy binge 10 years ago. The first day I had to recuse myself from projects that concerned small rodents in peril (I saw at least 3), as I had awoken that morning to the kind of ominous subject line on my BlackBerry that every working mom dreads: “Bad news—gerbils dead.” (Click here to see the full e-mail.)
So while compared to Bologna, I definitely missed the food, and the four-hour dinners with an eclectic mix of children’s book people comparing notes on the most bizarre storyline they had heard from a French publisher that day, overall Frankfurt seemed like another great opportunity to see what the rest of the world is up to, widen our book horizons and hopefully discover a great book or two.
