Mature Flâneur

At the Frankfurt International Book Fair…

…My new book is popular throughout the galaxy

Although I’ve written eleven books, and have flogged them at festivals and book fairs for thirty-three years, I have never before made it to Frankfurt for the biggest book festival in the world. This year, however, I happened to be in Paris in October, and told my publisher I would be happy to come to the Frankfurt Buchmesse and help out the team that manages our booth. They said sure, why not, and offered to put me up in a hotel for the final weekend of the fair, October 20–22, when the grounds are open to the general public.

Now, it might seem funny to have a fair that is closed to the public for its first two and a half days, but the event is first and foremost a place for foreign rights dealmaking. That’s why publishers from all over the world attend. They buy and sell foreign language rights for each other’s books. Contracts are signed. Money changes hands.

It seems only as an afterthought are the gates thrown open to the public for the weekend. The reading public then throngs through the gates en masse to get a first glimpse at forthcoming titles on display, and to attend readings by famous authors — the headliner this year was Salman Rushdie. Some fans, if they are lucky, get up close for a chat with a literary idol. There’s a whole “meet the author” venue one can sign up for, which gives readers a few minutes one-on-one for a private signing with their literary crush. The Germans have each encounter timed right down to the minute.

I confess, I was blown away at the scale and scope of the fair grounds. Four massive pavilions, two floors each, were filled with publishers’ booths, hundreds of them, featuring tens of thousands of new books. While one entire building was just for German publishers, three others housed publishers from perhaps a hundred other nations — Bangladesh, Korea, Brazil, Basque and Corsican books. There was even a booth of New Zealand publishers!

Each year a country is featured as the “Guest of Honour,” and given an entire floor of one of the smaller pavillions. In 2023, it was Slovenia, a south-central European nation founded in 1991 during the break-up of Yugoslavia. As the festival website declares, Solvenia is a “comparatively young country with a centuries-old literary tradition.”

The country’s publishers set up a beautiful open floorspace filled with books from and about Slovenia. The roof was covered with dramatic tapestries composed of traditional Slovenin lace-work, all stitched together and hung in such a way that the ceiling light cast intricate, dappled shadows on the carpet. This was done, so one of the Slovenian event managers told me, to create a lighting effect that mimicked the experience of being deep in a Slovenian forest.

The German pavillion, naturally, was the most packed of all, with lines winding out the doors, as readers queued patiently to get a book signed by their favorite authors. It made me delirious to see tens of thousands of people packed in this one space, all crazy for books. Everyone seemed to be having a great time — a veritable Octoberfest of books, but intoxicated by stories instead of beer!

One of the other things I really enjoyed were the number of attendees wearing fantasy costumes to celebrate books about their favorite alternate universes, whether Star Wars, fairytales, or Manga superheros. Japanese comic books have big “cosplay” fan groups in Europe. These folks buy or create their own elaborate costumes of their favorite characters. Groups of them, most kids in their teens and twenties, hung out in little encampments around the open fairgrounds. I often found them strolling through the pavillions with a certain swagger and nonchalance, like these three, below, totally owning the purple!

Some of them allowed me to take their pictures.

My own work at the festival was the least interesting part of the event. Everyone from the Watkins/Collective Ink Group (the company that publishes my books) was there for the foreign rights deals. As a small-to-mid-sized publisher, the paid staff typically pack up and shut down the booth before the festival weekend. But, because I had agreed to come along (for free), they saw this as an opportunity to keep the booth open to the public through Sunday. I would be on my own.

My job was simply to sit at the booth, hand out catalogues to whoever wanted them, and sell off the excess books the team brought to the event and did not want to lug back home. Basically, I was selling a remainder bin at 5 euros/book. The foreign language pavillions had much less traffic wandering through than the German ones, though there were still plenty of scavangers. Most of the time, however, my job was as exciting as this:

I still managed to sell 350 euros worth of books, plus several copies of Mature Flâneur (to the discriminating readers who were willing to pay full price, since I brought my own books with me). A German publisher’s rep picked up a copy of Mature Flâneur, too. So who knows, maybe next year at the Frankfurter Buchmesse a new translation of Reifer Flâneur will be available in the jam-packed German pavilion, and I’ll be one of those authors signing books for fans lined up all the way out the door…

I left the festival feeling elated. I suppose I’ve been getting more and more pessimistic about publishing through the years. Between Tik Tok and Chat GPT, I worry about the future of the written word. Book sales have gone down worldwide since the pandemic ended. So it was marvellous to be surrounded by tens of thousands of avid readers. One woman actually bought 14 books from our bin — and she had many more in her three sturdy canvas bags she had picked up from other publishers. She was in book lovers’ heaven. And so was I.

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Join the rest of the galaxy and read my book, Mature Flâneur: Slow Travels through Portugal, France, Italy and Norway in the original English — don’t wait for the Tatooine/Tusken Raider translation.