The Way We Were

The first time I turned up at the Frankfurt Book Fair, a publisher in his 20s with only four books on his list and no hotel booking, I went to the accommodations bureau at the railway station to find a bed. They took one look at me, made a Germanically efficient (and accurate) estimation of my financial capabilities and promptly packed me off to a hotel room, which turned out be above a brothel. Years later, a group of British publishers and I were swapping Buchmesse war stories, and one of them revealed that in his early Frankfurt visits, his budget didn't even extend to the city's red light district. He'd stayed at a campsite miles out of town, putting on a coat and tie in his tent each morning before riding the train into the city.

Things have certainly changed since then, both for Lonely Planet (for one thing, I can afford a hotel in a nicer neighborhood) and for book fairs, which began as meeting places in an era when most business was conducted by phone and mail, and have morphed into occasions for the unveiling of new technologies, among other things.

No fair mirrors Lonely Planet's growth more than the London Book Fair. Over the years, we've changed at about the same pace. The LBF was founded in 1971; Lonely Planet was established in 1973. London's fair now attracts about 25,000 people; we've published more than 650 books. We've both gone from local to global, with the LBF beginning as a local operation aimed at the British book trade and now serving as a mini-Frankfurt. My wife and I assembled our first book at our kitchen table; we now publish books on virtually every country on Earth.

And as both entities have expanded, Lonely Planet's use of the London Book Fair has changed, too. For instance, in Lonely Planet's early days, when most of our books were about Asia and a lot of our business was also in Asia, I remember one Asian distributor who hated to pay for the books he imported via the more traditional methods. "So much paperwork and bureaucracy, so many bribes to be paid," he'd complain. "It's much better I just pay you in cash anytime you're in the country." So the invoices would mount up for a year or so and then one day, in some back street cafe, large rolls of greenbacks would be counted out across the table and I'd stuff them into every available pocket.

For years the London Book Fair played a similar role. As Lonely Planet's publishing program moved on from Asia to the countries of Africa we discovered those same paperwork, bureaucracy and bribes problems followed us to another continent. "It's much better I pay you when I visit the London Book Fair," one of our African distributors would regularly proclaim, popping open his briefcase to reveal neat stacks of hard currency. "Taking cash out of the country is much easier than transferring it through the banks."

Alas, times move on. Some of those countries have become more respectable and their banks more efficient, but unhappily it's modern terrorism security concerns that have made it a very bad idea to return from a book fair toting large quantities of paper currency.

Although I don't think I'm ever again going to have as much fun at the London, Frankfurt or BEA book fairs as I did when Lonely Planet was a small hand-to-mouth operation, it's nice to no longer need to explain what our guidebooks are about or tote cases full of currency past airport security. And London continues to offer opportunities to dip into every corner of the business. We still meet many of our international distributors there. We will bump into them at the BEA as well, but they're more likely to be in Europe.

And let's face it, where do you want to be come nightfall: London or Frankfurt?