Book Fairs

Filing on Saturday from Frankfurt, Richard Charkin’s last blog post: “Hall 8 is emptying. The bigwigs have all left for home and now the sales and rights directors have the place more or less to themselves. The atmosphere has been less hectic than usual, a natural consequence of the world economy. There seem to be […]

There’s a quality to this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, in these perilous times, that leaves one speechless. But that makes for a very short column. The final accounting–and it is all about accounting these days–won’t come for a while. So the best handle on the show I found is stolen from a prominent journalist at […]

One modest book lifted to international acclaim with help from exposure at the Frankfurt Book Fair is Sam Savage’s FIRMIN: Adventures of an American Lowlife, originally bought out of the slush pile by Coffee House Press. The book’s path to success in translation–with a reported 300,000 copies sold in Italy and 100,000 copies sold in […]

At this morning’s opening press conference, Frankfurt Book Fair director Juergen Boos said, “The book sector follows its own rules, even in the face of the international financial  crisis. This has been demonstrated by a survey of the heads of German publishing  houses, which the Book Fair recently carried out in cooperation with the magazine […]

A wet weekend did not deter attendance at Washington, DC’s National Book Festival on Saturday. The AP says the event has grown from about 30,000 people in 2001 to approximately 120,000 attendees this year. Created by First Lady Laura Bush, the Librarian of Congress’s James Billington is “hopeful it will continue under a new administration. […]