Publishers Lunch and the Idea Logical Company have given up on the Frankfurt in New York rights fair originally planned for next spring, but will go ahead with a renamed event the following year. A tabletop rights fair with the working title of Publishing in New York: A Rights and Editorial Fair will take place in the city in May 2003, but without the support of the Frankfurt Fair.
The fair said in a statement that it had tried to put together a 2002 event, which had been scheduled a couple of days before the BookExpo America show, also in New York, as a cooperative project with the Reed group, which organizes BEA (Reed also owns PW), but had been turned down. Citing budget reductions ahead for American publishers next year, the Frankfurt organizers said they "did not want to force publishers to choose between FNY and BEA." (Frankfurt's former press director, Ruediger Wischenbart, said there was no connection between himself and FNY, and that the suggestion in PW [News, Nov. 26] that his recent departure was linked to the cancellation of FNY was without foundation.)
A joint statement by Michael Cader of Publishers Lunch and Mike Shatzkin of the Idea Logical Company, who had planned the FNY opening, said they would go ahead with the show in 2003, when the BEA show will be in Los Angeles. Shatzkin added, "We hope the climate will allow the Frankfurt Book Fair to join us again in some capacity in the future as the show moves forward." He and Cader stressed that the show was intended to be not only a rights fair but also an editorial fair for editors, agents and packagers, and was "designed to be efficient, affordable and modest in scale." They added that they planned to form a steering committee from all segments of the publishing community to advise on how best to proceed.
