Having seen the retail fish market that is the Kuala Lumpur International Book Fair, I have never been enamoured of them -- book fairs, I mean. They are too big, fussy and noisy for my taste, I have decided. KLAB (The Kuala Lumpur Alternative Book Fair) is my limit -- small, smiley and friendly.“You have to go to Frankfurt,” I have been told for ten years. Why? “Because it is an experience, because it is the biggest book fair in the world.” But none of that were convincing arguments as far as I was concerned. You probably think this strange. I have been buying books for over half a century (saving tuck-shop cash when I was in school), but the very thought of hundreds of thousands of square metres of books scares the life out of me. That’s why I avoid mega stores whichever city I visit, just as I avoid warehouse sales. I find them too intimidating (and more than a little stupid). My best buys have always been from the little stores in the corner -- some curated, some not. One never knows what one will find there -- I bought a lovely hardback edition of Winnie the Pooh from a little shop with about fifty English language titles in Frankfurt this last trip.
Even so, when I received this invitation from Litprom (Society for the promotion of African, Asian and Latin American Literature), I was cautiously excited. I was prepared to be disappointed, but I was determined to give it my best shot -- whatever that meant. Although airfares and board was paid by the organisers, participants had to bear the cost of shipping their books, which can come to quite a bit when calculated in Euros (for a small publisher like us). Anyway, after I got to Frankfurt, I was told that exhibitors were not allowed to sell books except on the last two days when the fair was open to the public. Even then, a strict ‘no discount’ policy was to be followed. I ended up giving away most of my books because I didn’t want to ship them back.
The facts about the Frankfurter Buchemesse boggle the mind a bit -- started about 600 years ago, over 7,300 exhibitors in 5 humungous halls from 100 countries, some 300,000 trade visitors, 10,000 journalist and hundreds of forums and book events -- but none of that quite begins to give one an idea of the magnitude. “Try not to be overwhelmed”, “sit back and watch the book world go by”, “don’t try to take it all in on your first visit”, are some advice I was given. Still, when one goes in on the first day, it is like being hit by a tsunami. (In the 5 days I was there, I’d say I took in less than 5 percent of the fair, including Jonathan Franzen and Gunter Grass).
Silverfish Books was given a stall with the rest of those in the invitation programme, in Hall 5.0 -- each hall has several levels -- with the Arab countries, Africa and the East Europeans. The floor above us housed the Latin Americans, and next door were most of the Asian countries, including Malaysia. (The Malaysian pavilion in Hall 6.1 was curious, to say the least. Looking like a decorated piece of cheese cake, it appeared to be caught in a conundrum: what was it promoting, tourism or books? It was so ‘gomen’, it was scary. The first two times I visited it, I quietly walked away because there appeared to be no one interested in talking to visitors. Only on my third visit did I see some friendly faces (from ITNM); I introduced a few friends of mine from Litprom to them and I believe they had a good meeting.) The biggest, Hall 8.0, was mainly occupied by exhibitors from the US, UK and India. (A person who should know said that there were more UK exhibitors in Hall 8.0 than at the London Book Fair. He also dismissed them derisively by saying that they were only interested in selling, not buying.) I visited Hall 8.0 on Friday afternoon and found it surprisingly quiet; maybe all businesses had already been successfully concluded by then.
Frankfurter Buchmesse is the place where one buys and sells rights; that is the raison d’etre of the fair. Though I have received inquiries from over ten countries, from Hungary to Holland (this will be a drawn-out affair), the most important aspect of the fair is how it opens the eyes of those of us stuck in the anglophone book world. Some of the East European and the Latin American stands were stunning (and not in the tourism promotion way), the quality and range of books were quite astounding. I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of children’s books from Morocco and Lebanon, coffee table books from Egypt, Ecuador and Rumania, and fiction from Africa and Latin America. One publisher from the Dominican Republic makes his books himself in his house -- he has 64 titles to date and sells them friends, relatives and universities. Another from Venezuela says he was broke for a whole year after a beautiful art-cum-poetry venture, though it didn’t stop him.
The best part of the fair was meeting all those people more passionate and crazier than oneself. And, there are plenty of crazies out there.
The worst part? Well, coming home to humungous North Korean style political posters on the roadside and the blank ink blotch painted on the cover of my Time magazine.
