Where else but in Frankfurt could this happen? It's nearing midnight on the Tuesday night before the Buchmesse officially opens. Hundreds of well-dressed publishing folk, fresh from wine-soaked meals and many publishing cocktail parties, cram into three stately reception rooms at the Frankfurter Hof hotel and jockey for a good view of some television screens put up for just this occasion. What occasion? you might ask.
Well, if you were anywhere else, you might assume the crowd had come to see a soccer match or a presidential debate. But no: these are international book people and what they'd come to see, broadcast from the U.K., was the announcement of the winner of the Man Booker prize. I can't say there was a collective roar when the name Aravind Adiga was announced; it was more like a collective sigh of recognition, and I think I heard a few I-told-you-sos. Apparently, many were fans of Adiga's debut novel, The White Tiger, published in the U.K. by Atlantic and in the U.S. by Free Press (and whose editor we profile this week, p. 17).
Still, it was an odd scene—“surreal” in the description of a one young journalist. So many people so invested in a book award for a literary novel in an era that regularly decries the death of a fair that many worry is the last hurrah of publishing as we know it. But what makes it even weirder is that the very next day, those same people began traipsing the floors of the eight halles of the book fair buying and selling books like Juliet, a back-to-the-future revisitation of Romeo and Juliet, or, say, a new Paul McCartney biography. Books that are unlikely to be shortlisted for any awards anytime soon. But books, perhaps, that will sell.
Taken together, these two scenes comprise the essence of the modern book business: a marriage of literature and commerce, principle and profit, a union, as a legendary publisher used to say, of class and crass. Gone are the days of narrow publisher identity. In modern publishing life, “everyone does everything,” especially the big houses, which can't afford to be too specialized. That's why, for example, Knopf publishes premium celebrity bios (Bill Clinton, Barbara Walters) and St. Martin's dabbles in heavy-going nonfiction (e.g., Alan Weisman's The World Without Us). It's also why smart, thinking people can get almost as excited about a deal for a new cookbook as for the National Book Award nominees, which were announced the day after the Man Booker prize—sans public Frankfurter Hof television coverage, but never mind.
To say that publishing has become bottom-line focused is, methinks, a gross understatement. And to say that Book People are worried, particularly right now, about the economic changes sure to come, is understatement as well. Everybody's worried. Yet here we are, in a terrified global economy, our 401(k)s battered and leaking; jobs, college plans and god knows what else in peril, and what do we do? We fly across the ocean to an overpriced, rainy city, partly so we can stand in a room with like-minded people and congratulate each other on our very fine taste, as seen on TV. Call that silly or wasteful if you must. But that's what, at least some of the time, the book business is all about: seeing good literature, however briefly, in the limelight, and hoping that, in the end, it will all still matter.
To see all our Frankfurt coverage, visit www.publishersweekly.com/frankfurt2008
