Motoko Rich on the FBF

I referenced it earlier, but here’s the official link to Motoko Rich’s article on Anna and Lorin Stein and the Frankfurt Book Fair.

There’s a lot to say about the fair, and about it’s impact on international publishing, and I’ll try and do more of this over the next couple weeks, but for now, I want to point out that it’s absolutely true that the Hof is the nerve center of the FBF nightlife, and if you’re going to be in the “in-crowd” you have to be there mingling, sipping a drink, chatting, all night. Four hours sleep becomes a luxury.

But it was by hanging out there that E.J. and I randomly met the agent for a South African novelist we’re interested in (until that moment we had no idea who represented this author), and it is the place that info from meetings gets amplified, connections are made, books are discussed, and so on.

John Freeman—my new blog idol for the amazing work he did covering the fair—has a nice post about this scene, and a great urban publishing legend:

According to a friend, a dutch publisher coming home in a blackout once made the mistake of giving his business card to the taxi driver, not the card for his hotel. He woke up 8 hours later in Amsterdam with a rather large bill. He then got on a plane and flew back to Frankfurt and went right on with his fair.