Megalithic book circle is centrepiece at Frankfurt Book Fair

By Jean-Baptiste Piggin Oct 20, 2005, 14:39 GMT

The Brockhaus volumes whish are as large as garage doors and errected by workers at the Frankfurt Book Fair in Frankfurt, Germany, Sunday 16 October 2005. EPA/BORIS ROESSLER

Frankfurt - For five heady days every year, the world's publishers meet at the Frankfurt Book Fair to negotiate who will pay the most for the latest internationally interesting books.

It's a micro-world where exhibition designers are always looking for new ways to attract attention.

Sometimes the books themselves are placed atop one another like bricks to make eye-catching stacks as tall as a man. Many publishers turn the artwork on book covers into big posters that decorate their stands.

A German encylopaedia company, Interluebke, took this to the monumental stage this year by erecting 5-metre-high models of its books on the fair's main square.

All 30 volumes making up the latest Brockhaus encyclopaedia were arranged in a 30-metre-diameter circle, somewhat like the megalithic rings that dot Europe's landscape, and protected from the elements by a huge marquee roof.

As they passed, most fair visitors could not resist feeling the covers to see if there were real pages inside. There were none. The models were made of board, covered with red and black leatherette like the actual books.

Interluebke pointed out that the entire encyclopaedia was also available on two DVDs and a USB memory stick.

Standing stones were also a feature of South Korea's exhibition as this year's Frankfurt guest of honour.

While the South Korean publishers in the Asian section of the fair opted for booth furnishings in contemporary cream and white, the Korean cultural pavilion on the other side of the fairground was dominated by a roomful of dark, irregularly shaped stone pillars.

These were however no ordinary rocks. They were wired to notebook computers containing text of the 100 'ubiquitous' books that modern South Koreans know best. Visitors to this 'Enter Korea' exhibition could even order instant printouts of these computerized books.

Around a quarter of a million people will visit the fair before it ends Sunday, and it is a safe bet that none but a handful will have heard of any Korean books before this week.

But that is the spirit of the fair: respectful curiosity about other nations' literature.

Publishers and the book-loving public leave humbled by the thought that the world contains so many books and that even a keen reader is unlikely to read more than about 5,000 in a lifetime.

Translation contracts negotiated at the fair ensure that at least some of those books cross borders and achieve international ubiquity.

Authors who are celebrities in their homelands and find that they pass unnoticed in the Frankfurt aisles can hope through translation to achieve the wider fame of British authors like Nick Hornby, Ken Follett or Stephen Hawking who were at the fair this week.

Hornby writes best-selling comic novels. Follett is a top thriller writer. Hawking, who is paralysed by motor neuron disease, writes about cosmic physics. Britain and the United States are the world's most successful literature exporters.

While the fair celebrates literature and learning, the vast bulk of the books on display, as every year, are mostly prosaic.

Many are school textbooks, which will never win much affection from reluctant learners, or cookbooks, or advice books like a current big seller from Britain, 'How to Pay Less for Just About Anything'.

The fount from which many of tomorrow's books appear is Hall 8.0, the international section where top publishers from London and New York reap rich rewards by selling translation rights to their books. <!--page-->

Their extensive stands do not welcome casual visitors, and consist of dozens of tables where clients, principally from eastern Europe and Asia, are shown promising English-language books.

These contacts have often been booked weeks in advance, with half- hour slots in the executives' diaries all filled from Wednesday to Friday, the trade days before the general public is allowed in at the weekend.

Nearby, smaller publishers can only afford booths a couple of metres wide. For publishers on the most obscure subjects, trade inquiries can be few and far between and staff do welcome even casual visitors.

If the boredom becomes too much, there is always a pleasant diversion: open a book, read and forget the world. Many staff do.

The holy of holies of the book fair is the literary agents' centre, where hundreds of agents have booths to receive publishers.

Agents are the gate-keepers in modern western publishing, reading the countless manuscripts produced by hopeful writers and hawking the best of them to publishers. Along the way, agents read many hopeless manuscripts and are pestered with odd and unprofitable book ideas.

Since agents are never bored - they only have four days to meet dozens of publishers in Frankfurt - there is nothing they fear more than being waylaid by would-be authors or nosy journalists.

The agents' centre is walled off and visitors are only admitted by appointment.

Like a nightclub, it has sturdy young men manning the entrance to ensure that only the chosen get inside.

Curiously, the agents' centre this year shared half of a huge hall with the Frankfurt Fair press centre. Both were built out of moveable partitions, and news conferences were being held in a space where the hubbub of agents' conversations spilled over the dividing wall.

Hoping for a 'leak', journalists strained to pick out what was being said next door. They could not hear, but they also found questions on their own side of the wall inaudible because of the noise.