WESS Travels to the Frankfurt Book Fair, October 1998: A Report

by Jeffrey Garrett (Northwestern University)

Just how big is Frankfurt? Try to imagine O'Hare on the eve of the Christmas holidays, but with the crowds elbowing each other not to catch a flight to Minneapolis or Toledo, but instead a glimpse of Salman Rushdie or the new Nobel prizewinner, Portuguese writer Jose Saramago. Or imagine an entire city springing up overnight, its 200-300,000 inhabitants brought together by a single compelling interest: books, books, and more books, hundreds of thousands you can pick up and look at, in all the world's languages. Throw a thousand new multimedia CDs into the mix, and the uncounted wares of type designers, wood engravers, calendar and bookmark publishers, outside street vendors hawking used books, new books, exotic book paraphernalia, such as colored pencils hand-crafted of real tree branches, bark and all. Bus shuttles connect each of the ten Hallen (exhibit halls) of this vast book El Dorado, and each of the Hallen--the size of airplane hangers--is three, four, even five levels high. Ten publishers from Albania? No problem: go to Halle 9, ascend to the third level, but be ready for clouds of cigarette smoke. New gay and lesbian publishers? Halle 5, up two escalators, bitte sehr. This Emerald City of the Book lasts for just six days every year, disappears then Monday noon without a trace, to reconstitute itself magically the following October, like some extraordinary religious festival. Frankfurt is the largest German-language book fair in the world, but also, as the organizers are quick to point out, the world's largest English-language book fair--and who knows the largest book event of how many other languages.

No one knows just how old the Frankfurt fair really is and since when books and manuscripts of all kinds have been traded there. It is recorded that the Staufer emperor Friedrich II gave imperial protection to those traveling to the Frankfurt Fair in 1240. It is also known that Albrecht Dürer sent his wife from Nürnberg to Frankfurt to sell his prints at the fair around 1500. During the Reformation, Martin Luther's works were freely traded there, even though Luther was denounced as a heretic elsewhere in Germany and his works banned. But the confessional differences of the Reformation and the destruction of the 30 Years War ultimately brought the fair and the city of Frankfurt to its knees. While hundreds of foreign printers and booksellers came to Frankfurt in the early 17th century, one hundred years later Frankfurt had been deserted by foreigners--and even the publishers and printers of northern Germany--in favor of the much more liberal environment offered by the kings of Saxony in Leipzig, which was to retain its status as premier meeting place for the German and European publishing community until World War II. In 1945, with Leipzig locked behind the Iron Curtain, publishers once again discovered Frankfurt, and the book fair was re-established there in 1949. Today, the Frankfurt Book Fair, or Buchmesse, is flourishing like never before under the aegis of the Börsenverein, the trade association of German publishers and booksellers. It is the dream of most librarians with an interest in foreign books to travel, maybe just once in a lifetime, to Frankfurt for the Fair.

This dream was fulfilled for 15 librarians last October on a trip organized by members of WESS, the Western European Specialists Section of the Association of College and Research Libraries. The idea for this pilgrimage arose somewhere in Germany's Harz Mountains on a foggy day in mid October 1996, when a couple of WESS librarians who had ventured to Frankfurt that year realized that despite all the traditional fears--astronomical expense, booked up hotels, crowds, limits placed on "non-booktrade" visitors, insuperable language barriers--Frankfurt was doable, affordable, and, no doubt about it, enjoyable, too.

Once the decision was made to embark on this expedition, we began sending our feelers out early. In May 1997, at BookExpo in Chicago, we met representatives of the Book Fair, Ronald Weber and Sigrid Moritz, who assured us of their support to keep the costs down and interest value high. Knut Dorn, of Germany's leading export bookseller Otto Harrassowitz, heard of our plans and immediately offered to help with hotel tips, contacts, and even a bus tour along the Rhine. And since Frankfurt is a center of German publishing and printing--home to the leading houses of Suhrkamp and Insel, with the birthplace of printing, Gutenberg's Mainz, only 20 miles away--we began thinking of other book-related events, far more, of course, than it would be feasible or even advisable to plan. In December, the American Express travel office at Northwestern University agreed to manage all our payments and bookings, so by ALA in New Orleans, January 1998, we were ready to go live. A website was set up and a listserv, the sine qua non requirements for any interinstitutional project in the 1990s. Registrations began trickling in over the winter, and by June, when registrations were closed, 15 hardy souls had committed to the trip. Total cost for a nine-day journey to Germany, not including plane fare, but covering lodging, admission to the fair, all events, receptions, and tours, in-country connections by train, bus, and rental van, and a visit to the ancient town and monastery of Amorbach, came to about $600 per person.

WESS members traveled individually to Frankfurt, where they were met at the airport or found their own way to one of the hotels we had found for our group. Although warned that all Frankfurt hotels of acceptable quality are booked solid a year in advance, and that any rooms we would find would cost at least $125 a night plus a fair (unfair?) surcharge, we turned up lucky. With the help of our travel agent at Northwestern, we located room for seven members of our group in the Hotelschiff Peter Schlott, a boat-turned-hotel anchored on the Main River right off the Altstadt in Höchst, a medieval town with a Renaissance castle just 20 minutes by commuter train from the fair. Cost: just $50 per person and night, including a lavish breakfast that would take us straight through to dinner. Most everyone else in the WESS group was quartered at the Residenz Johann Wolfgang, a brand-new, squeaky clean hotel in the trendy Sachsenhausen part of Frankfurt, also just minutes by U-Bahn or S-Bahn from the fairgrounds. It was more expensive, but still an affordable $60 a night.

A highlight of the fair was our conversation with Peter Weidhaas, director of the Frankfurt fair since the 1970s and, according to a recent poll by the French newspaper Le Nouvel Observateur, one of the 100 most influential individuals in Europe today. It was a morning meeting, but Herr Weidhaas greeted each of us with a glass of fine Württemberg champagne bottled specially to celebrate the fair's 50th anniversary since starting up again after World War II. He told us of the fair's growth and diversification, of how in 1994, for the first time, electronic media were integrated into what until then had been "only" a book fair, and discussed his plans to recreate Frankfurt as a year-long virtual book fair on the World Wide Web. We asked about the implications for Frankfurt of the rebirth of the Leipzig book fair in the now-integrated German East, about the future need for a "physical" book fair at all in an age when virtually everything is accessible online, and the effects of online bookselling for the traditionally dense network of German and European bookstores with professional staff. Weidhaas was optimistic about the prospects for Frankfurt as long as it remained open to change and innovation. The conspicuous prosperity of the fair and the evident excitement of publishers and editors and just plain readers to see and to touch "physical" books and meet their authors and producers seem to bear out this positive assessment.

There is something for everyone in the endless halls of the Frankfurt Book Fair. Marje Schütze-Coburn, Feuchtwanger librarian at the University of Southern California and curator of a major US collection devoted to European emigration between 1933 and 1945, looked for and found small publishers concentrating on the same topics, including Edita Koch, editor of Exil, a journal of exile and emigration studies. Roger Brisson of Penn State, coordinator of the German Resources Project of the Association of Research Libraries and, on the side, a translator of the German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), uncovered a new electronic version of Hegel's works, published by Talpa-Verlag in Berlin, that he hopes now to make better known among United States librarians. Some of us took advantage of the opportunity to meet Latin American publishers, finding out the most reliable vendors of, say, Paraguayan books in the United States--at least in the estimation of the Cámara Paraguaya del Libro, represented with a booth at the Frankfurt Fair, in Hall 9.1 between the huge Brazilian representation and the almost-as-impressive presence of Argentinian and Chilean publishers--or books from central and eastern Europe, a particular interest of Jim Niessen of Texas Tech University, the moderator of the H-Net discussion group "Habsburg."

As Peter Weidhaas affirmed, librarians are welcome visitors to the Frankfurt Fair. Indeed, in addition to special meeting points for agents, illustrators, and journalists, in Hall 9.2 there is an impressive "International Booksellers and Librarians Center," or IBLC, where librarians can rest up in the middle of an exhausting day, sit at the coffee bar, visit with colleagues from other parts of the world, but also see interesting displays by European university libraries or the European Commission, or an exhibit of close to 200 new international publications in library and information science--with a free catalog to take home. The WESS group met with the organizers of the IBLC, the aforementioned Ronald Weber and Dr. Andreas Werner, head of collection development at the Frankfurt City and University Library, and were invited to come back again in a year or two--but not just as visitors, but as exhibitors and participants in the IBLC's active program of presentations and panel discussions that bring together librarians from all over the world.

Traveling to Frankfurt also presented us with the unique opportunity to explore Die Deutsche Bibliothek, Germany's national depository library, in its new and very impressive home on Adickesallee and meet with the director, Professor Klaus-Dieter Lehmann. We also visited other notable sites (and sights) in and around Frankfurt: the Schopenhauer-Archiv and the Africana collections of the University of Frankfurt, the vast labyrinthine offices of Otto Harrassowitz in Wiesbaden, the castle of the Prince of Hessen in nearby Kronberg, where we were guests of honor at a dinner hosted by German publisher K.G. Saur--in the castle library, no less, converted to a splendid refectory. A number of us split off from the group for some unique individual experiences. Harvard's Michael Olson traveled to Darmstadt to attend the presentation of the Büchner Preis, Germany's most prestigious literary distinction, to Austrian writer Elfriede Jelinek. Jim Niessen, Barbara Walden (Wisconsin), and Erika Linke (Carnegie Mellon) traveled to the Transylvanian Institute in Gundelheim to explore the legacy of German culture in the Balkans. And just about everyone traveled to Amorbach, 60 miles southeast of Frankfurt, for a tour of the splendid library of this former Benedictine abbey led by Dr. Fritz Kaiser, a private scholar who is now cataloging the music collection of Amorbach for RISM, the International Inventory of Musical Sources. In the evening, we enjoyed a command concert on the organ in the abbey church, a chat afterward with the organist, and then a venison dinner at a country inn, six miles further still into the hills of the Odenwald.

The WESS group also identified a SWAT team of sorts to follow up on an invitation from the library director at the University of Stuttgart, Werner Stephan, to present an all-day seminar on current developments in academic libraries in the United States. This group, made up of Gordon Anderson (Kansas), Jeff Garrett (Northwestern), Marianna McKim (Yale), and Mike Olson, spoke--in German--to a group of about 40 academic librarians, including several library and archive directors from all across southwestern Germany, about contemporary trends in book selection, collection management, and bibliographic instruction in American research libraries. And then back to Frankfurt for the fair!

Would we do it again? Absolutely, in a flash. Will we do it again? Well, that is a different question altogether. It was an huge effort to make all the plans and arrangements, and despite all the cost containment and the institutional support some of us enjoyed, traveling to Europe still costs a pretty pfennig. But then again: the year 2000 marks Johannes Gutenberg's 600th birthday, which incidentally is also the 100th anniversary of the Gutenberg Museum in Mainz. And the city of Mainz is promising to have the first huge book shindig of the new millenium, coincidentally planned to take place. . . when else? . . . during the Frankfurt Book Fair, from October 18 to 23, 2000. This is then WESS's own personal "Year 2000 Problem," but one we will enjoy grappling with, even as we savor the huge harvest of this year's journey to the greatest book event of the world.

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