Frankfurt here I come
Off to Frankfurt early on Tuesday October 13. I catch a flight from Birmingham at 7.05am which is well before the time I normally drag myself out of bed. But it’s worth it. I get into Frankfurt at 11am, park myself in the flat I rent with two other publishers and then meander off to the fair to set up our stand.
It’s an end of an era this year. In the last few years I have shared the flat with Martin Ellis, of Zymurgy, and Dan Hiscocks, of Eye Books. But now Dan is in the US and it’s just Martin and me and a publisher he knows. Let’s hope the Eritrean bar on the corner doesn’t miss the custom too much.
We got the flat after the three of us had dodged around Frankfurt staying at some very odd places. There was the “hotel” (in quotes because it was more like a small gaol) where we had to knock up the long-suffering Iranian man who ran it at 3 am when we got back from vital networking. There was the first time the three of us stayed together, in a flat big enough for one. And we shared it with our mate Francois, who oddly has refused to share with us since.
We stayed with a family outside Frankfurt one year and we once got hotel rooms just by the main station because Opodo didn’t realise that the bookfair was on and gave us the rooms at the normal rate not at the three-times-as-much-rate that’s charged for this week.
One Saturday night we were in Sachsenhausen after watching a protest march (against what we never found out) and the bar was full of Eintracht Frankfurt fans who had just seen their team beat Cologne 6-3. One young woman was buzzing around the bar because it was the first football match she’d been to. She came to talk to us and after I’d told her that not all football matches were that exciting and that a lot ended goalless she asked us how we liked Frankfurt. “Great except for the rip-off prices of places to stay,” we replied.
She said that her and her boyfriend had a three-bedroomed flat in the middle of town, high ceilings and it could be ours for a reasonable rate.
This will be our fourth year there and it’s very convenient. A two-minute walk gets you to the Hauptbanhoff (station to us) and a three minute ride takes you to Hall 8 which is where the English speaking publishing nations are housed. Incidentally it is the only hall where your bag is checked before you get in.
And while I affect a world weary ennui from the first morning – “Well, only five days to go,” is my reply to the early greetings – secretly I love Frankfurt. I love the buzz, I love all the books and I love talking shop to other publishers and moaning about authors, bookshops, internet sellers and other publishers. It’s a great week.
The purpose of course it to sell foreign rights and it takes a while to find out how to do this. You meet the same people year after year and you don’t buy from them and they don’t buy from you. But gradually you make contacts, gradually you start to buy books and people buy from you.
This year I’ve got great hopes of our World Cup caricature book (our marketing spend has been extended to T-shirts) and other books with an international theme, A Develyshe Pastime, which is about how football in all its forms spread around the world, William Garbutt, about the English manager who revolutionised Italian football, The Rebel Tours, about the cricket tours of South Africa during the eighties, and A Passport to Football, about following the beautiful game around Europe.
Prost!