Scenes from the Largest International Book Fair in the World

Guten tag!  It's been a pretty hectic few days, but your correspondent is back in Blighty nursing a pair of achy feet after touring the Frankfurter Buchmesse for two days.  The Buchmesse lived up to the hype about being a giant forum for the trading of international publishing rights - details of which I'll elaborate on in a further post.  In relation to publishing in general, I learned a few things which help to put some perspective on the industry.

The first hopeful statistic: there are 214 publishing companies in a 20-mile radius of Oxford, UK alone. This is 214 publishers in a town so small I'm liable to walk myself into a cow field if I miss a turn. Sure, some of these "publishers" are one woman and a dog, but that doesn't mean they aren't providing an important and crucial service for authors with something important to say.


At the same time, the large publishing conglomerates weren't above a little muscle-flexing. Look at the display booth for Cengage, a major educational publisher. It actually has two levels for conducting meetings.

Meetings seemed to be the order of the day. The more formidable the booth, the less likely an uninvited visitor was going to be able to walk in and browse. Every inch of space was dedicated to the international rights staff, who conducted back to back to back meetings with clients around the world, selling translation rights, co-publishing rights, territory rights, digital rights, you name it. It sounds boring until you realize, this is how the author writing from Skokie, Illinois, gets his words spread to audiences in Sweden, China, Kenya, and everywhere else in the world.


I was grateful that several publishers were kind enough to lend a rights manager or two to meet directly with small groups of students. I was also happy to see representatives from some of the smaller presses back home, traveling to Germany from as far as Sudbury, Massachusetts and Champaign, Illinois. As a rights manager from Oxford University Press reminded us,"Our most important mission is to spread knowledge".  By definition, publishing is a social enterprise, and it's the people - particularly, their variety and diversity - that make it important.