Stories from the Frankfurt fair

It was not easy to deal in books five hundred years ago.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
15 October 2022 Saturday 03:54
10 Reads
Stories from the Frankfurt fair

It was not easy to deal in books five hundred years ago. The booksellers who went to the Frankfurt fair, in spring or autumn, had to be careful on the roads, lest bandits attack their car.

That is why some of them preferred to move their printed material by boat, first down the Rhine and then down the Main to the city on the Hesse; a suitable means of transport was barrels. But despite all the inconveniences, at the biannual fair in Frankfurt they distributed their works, along with printers from the city such as Peter Schöffer, others who came from places sometimes quite far away, such as the legendary Venetian Aldo Manuzio.

Frankfurt had something to be an irradiating focus of the printed book, not in vain it was the closest important city to Mainz, where Gutenberg had created the first printing press. But over the centuries its commercial appeal languished, and its book capital of Germany gave way to Leipzig.

However, after World War II and the partition of Germany, Leipzig remained on the communist side of the GDR. And when democratic Germany wanted to restore its cultural "soft diplomacy" and send a message that after the horrible Nazi parenthesis it was once again betting on books and culture, Frankfurt was the chosen city.

Frankfurt's new 20th century book fair opened in 1949, with 20 German publishers presenting more than 8,400 titles attracting 13,000 visitors. It quickly became international, and in the 1950s it was already the favorite annual destination of the great French, British or North American publishers, who collapsed the great hotels of the town while buying and selling rights and agreeing to magnificent co-editions.

Carlos Barral, one of the few Spanish publishers who began to frequent it at that time, recalled a relationship system that linked "intimate banquets and dinners, cocktails and regular meetings outside the fairgrounds." There the great releases and the literary consecrations of the following months were decided.

And along with these privileged ones, also small publishers, booksellers, distributors, agents, scouts, and of course authors, the entire international book ecosystem met in the city of Main.

There was always a "book of the year" that caught the attention of the book barons and journalists, and generated numerous translations, as happened in 1959 with Günter Grass's The Tin Drum, which came out consecrated from the meeting. In later years they would be The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco, A Whole Man by Tom Wolfe (before it was written, since from a certain point on simple synopses began to be negotiated) or The Man Who Whispered to Horses by Nicholas Evans.

Very attentive to the socio-political air of each era, the fair underwent the alterations of the 1960s: after the Six Day War, the Israeli pavilion had to be guarded; in 1968 Daniel Cohn Bendit himself led the disturbances that forced the closure of part of the enclosure.

In the 1990s, it would constitute a forum for permanent debate on the Salman Rushdie case, which forced security measures to be taken when the novelist was invited, and led to the exclusion of Iranian representatives for several years.

Held in an atmosphere of strangeness a few weeks after 9/11 in 2001, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, upon receiving the Peace Prize awarded on the closing day, described it as “the first violent act with truly global communication of human history."

Peter Weidhass, who directed it from 1974 to 1999, pointed out some of the reasons for the success of this autumn event promoted by the Association of German Booksellers and Publishers. At the time of the cold war, the fair represented a symbol of the cultural reconstruction of the country; after the fall of the wall, a dissemination platform for ex-communist countries. It offers publishers around the world the quintessential annual experience, a source of ideas that also provides a sense of belonging. It welcomes the most relevant technological innovations and points out the reading trends that are coming.

And, together with commercial exchanges, it favors intellectual debate, in its spaces and through the books it shows (its managers present it – somewhat exaggeratedly – ​​as “the world capital of ideas”)

Since the 1970s, the fair has offered a pavilion to invited literature. In this way, the "central theme" of the call is fixed, which several months in advance is addressed (and translated) by German publishers -and later international-, and that during the opening days attracts journalists, several thousand attend, and assistants of all kinds. At the same time, it proposes an extensive cultural program -exhibitions, theater, music- linked to the host country, which extends throughout Germany.

Those from France, Japan, Mexico, Brazil, Ireland, China, South Korea, Indonesia, Georgia, the Arab world, New Zealand, Finland, Canada... have been some of the invited literatures over the years.

Spain appeared for the first time in 1991. At the height of the socialist government of Felipe González, a few months after the crucial year of 1992, the aim was to provide a strong image of modernity and cultural recovery of the country after the long period of dictatorship. A pavilion designed by the Catalan Alfredo Arribas represented an Iberian arena with a sand floor. The inauguration was attended by then-minister Jordi Solé Tura, and among the guests were distinguished personalities from the so-called “new Spanish narrative” of democracy, from Eduardo Mendoza to Almudena Grandes, including Antonio Muñoz Molina and Carme Riera. There was no lack of controversy, such as the absence of Nobel Prize winner Camilo José Cela.

And it was useful: the nineties were going to be those of consolidation of the international sale of Spanish literature rights, until then usually outside these circuits.

In 2007 it was the turn of Catalan culture. With the impetus of the Institut Ramon Llull (IRL) and the Catalan publishers, the preparation was long, passed through several ministers of Culture, directors of the IRL and the curator Anna Soler-Pont, and also produced controversial data: Catalan authors in the castellana were not included (or were invited too late); some important signatures were made to beg (a server had to act as a goodwill ambassador between Baltasar Porcel and Josep Bargalló of the IRL so that the participation of the Majorcan author was raised in terms that pleased him).

But it constituted a great Catalan party in the country of Goethe and a moment of cultural self-affirmation, with the greatest of the Catalan letters of the moment, from Joan Margarit to Jaume Cabré passing through Miquel de Palol and Maria Barbal; an opening speech full of wit by Quim Monzó, castellers and a screen by Perejaume in the central square of the fair and a wide musical and gastronomic presence in the city.

The budget amounted to 12 million euros -the same amount that the Spanish presence will have this year- and the final result, in the words of the current director of the Institució de les Lletres Catalanes, Izaskun Arretxe, is that the initiative "multiplied by much the number of translations from Catalan” (only the year of the fair 154 titles were translated).

The world's largest professional book fair is also open to non-professional visitors; it usually receives about 300,000 attendees. Spain returns this year to the first "normal" call after the pandemic, with its literature in different languages ​​and its desire to show the "overflowing creativity" -slogan chosen by the organizers- of the current moment, and to give a new impetus to the cycle international opened in the same city three decades ago. The presence of the King and Queen at the opening ceremony will contribute to giving packaging to the bet.

Whoever signs these lines is not neutral in the face of the attraction of the Frankfurt fair: I have covered it as a journalist for more than fifteen years, I wrote a book about its operation, I collaborated in the central exhibition of the Catalan year and this year I have done it in the literary program. Without saying, like the editor Jorge Herralde-, that the fair "is the image of paradise", one likes this meeting very much and its achievements in the field of the cultural industry and culture "tout court" seem admirable. ”. You always have to be attentive to what is moving at the Frankfurt fair. And this year for two reasons.