Parties

After the Halls close for the night is when the serious work starts. This week in Frankfurt featured more than its share of blowout parties, impromptu gatherings, and late night soirees.

At the traditional buttoned-up affair thrown by Bertelsmann, Random House Chairman and CEO Markus Dohle made an made an impression by greeting guests with his enthusiastic handshaking. (When did receiving lines at corporate book parties become a trend?)

Cologne’s Dumont Verlag hosted agents and publishers on Friday night at the Mantis nightclub at what was promised to be a “roof-top party with dancing,” yet turned out to be a “second floor balcony party with standing around.” Everyone huddled in their coats around the gas fired heaters. One rather tall Swedish agent got so close to one I swear she nearly singed her hair. Someone speculated that the party was probably an effort by Dumont to spend some of the windfall they earned from Charlotte Roche’s half-million copy bestselling novel Feuchtgebiete (which translates as ‘wetlands’ and depicts a girl’s hospitalization after a botched job shaving her pubic hair). Roche, sadly, wasn’t present,

but at least the pretzels were good.

Last year’s Young Publishers party was notable for the single dancing girl who cleared the dance floor with her martial-arts moves (all done in high heeled boots). This year’s party, at multi-level warehouse on the edge of downtown, was most notable for the five euro cover charge, fifty cent deposit for beer bottles, and the feeling that a fire could have wiped out half the global publishing community under the age of 40. This was, above all, a smoker’s party – with people gleefully lighting up and thwarting Frankfurt’s recent policies banning indoor puffing. Chad and I made some new friends from Bloomsbury Germany, who upon leaving at 2 a.m. expressed genuinely surprise they had such a good time talking to a couple of Americans all night.

As Andrew mentioned below, there was the Exhibitor’s Night bash at the Congress Center celebrating the Book Fair’s 60th anniversary, described below. In addition to what Andrew has said, I can only add that if anyone is curious — the Turkish-German singer who performed is named Muhabbet; he was followed by the duo Friend ‘n Fellow and the ubiquitous DJ…somebody or other. Me, I hit the chill out room once the DJ started. The chill out room hosted a “Poetry Slam” at the time, which nearly sent me careening for the exit. It was much to my surprise, quite relaxing, especially compared to the torturous techno being played on the dance floor.

Indeed, one of strangest attractions at a party I’ve ever seen – the Human Teletubbies. No, I don’t mean the cartoon characters, but women wearing vests with a small computer screen embedded in them. I stopped on to ask what was playing on the screen and she told me it was a montage of images from the 60 years of the Fair (it resembled a powerpoint presentation). I asked the nearest Teletubbie if she found it awkward. She merely looked at me and shrugged.

“How German, I thought…” Of course, I’m not she understood a word I said.

Somehow, the final stop of the night always seems to be the Frankfurter Hoff. Aside from some confusion one night when I accidentally crashed a Droemer Knaur cocktail party where I was most definitely not welcome, there were usually some friendly faces in the crowd — including Richard “Dickie” Nash, Charlie Winton, and David Poindexter. (Next year, I’m told, I really must crash the Russian publishers party instead.)

On Saturday night, the always poised Anne-Solange Noble discussed a new edition of Marguerite Duras that is being published by Chad’s “Open Letter” press later this year. Around 2:30 a.m. Grove/Atlantic publisher Morgan Entriken displayed uncharacteristic restraint by turning down an invitation to his own Grove/Cannongate party early this Sunday morning.

“I’m old,” said Entriken, “and I’m going home.”

A highlight of any year at Frankfurt - if you are a cookbook publisher or author at least - is the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards party at the Casino Vila Bon, a stately 18th century edifice 20 minutes’ walk from the fair.

Under the stewardship of founder Edouard Cointreau, the Gourmand World Cookbook Awards have developed into the world’s only genuinely global book awards for food and wine books. In an exhaustive process, books are judged firstly at a national level, with the winners going on to compete the following year in a ‘best in the world’ contest.

The winners of this and previous years’ awards are displayed on the Gourmand stand (Hall 6.1 B903, C903 and D905).

Everyone knows Paulo Coelho was a rock lyricist early in his career, but who knew he could sing? The author was surprisingly on-key as he joined the band on stage last night in a version of Bob Marley’s classic “No Woman, No Cry” at party in his honor at the King Kamehameha Club, sponsored jointly by his German language publisher Diogenes and Mercedes Benz.

The 61-year-old was all smiles while serenading the crowd of publishing execs and assorted well wishers.

Fans of Coelho treat him with a cultish, messianic fervor. Just in case you miss the comparison with God, the invitation made it overt. It came – at least to one friend, hand delivered – on a near poster sized card and the image, of Coelho reaching out and pointing to a glass of wine – riffed on Michaelango’s portrait of God on the Sistine Chapel ceiling as he reaches out his hand to give life to Adam.

Flat screen TV’s around the club flashed portraits of Coelho’s fans posing with their favorite of his books, images he solicited himself off his Website. The only thing missing from the evening were temporary tattoos of the author that could be applied to one’s body, or at the very least, some free copies of his books. Perhaps the organizers assumed everyone there was already familiar with his work (though a surprising number surveyed admitted to having never read him..

As the evening wound down, people slowly trickled out into the drizzling night, the Bossa Nova band, with an impossibly leggy Brazilian singer, finished up with the Joao Gilberto songbook.

Surprisingly, for such a posh party the liquor on offer were call brands only and there were no goodie bags of gifts (or maybe I just got there too late).

Really, after selling one hundred million copies, would the keys to a new Mercedes have been too much to ask?

One of several parties at the Frankfurter Hof Hotel last night was the Berlin Verlag party, where many publishing types gathered (including the Frankfurt Fellows, who seem to be at all the parties) to hear the announcement of this year’s Man Booker Prize. The Man Booker people, co-sponsors of the party, had arranged for the live announcement by the BBC to be shown on large TV screens dotted around the ornate and tightly packed hospitality room.

After a few false alarms, the announcement was finally made and the book industry could wallow in about ten seconds of glorious televised coverage before the BBC went back to covering the global financial crisis, and then showed a video of Tom Jones.

Still, this was sufficiently long to discover that Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger had won the £50,000 award, becoming the fourth Indian writer (not counting V S Naipaul), and the fourth debutant novelist, to win the award.

Frankfurt Fellows celebrate on the Main

 

 

A pleasant cruise up Frankfurt’s Main river on the aptly -named Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was in order Monday night for those lucky individuals chosen to  participate in the Frankfurt’s successful Fellowship and Invitation Programmes.

The two professional development programmes aim to bring people to Frankfurt who otherwise wouldn’t make it, either because they’re not quite senior enough, or because they lack the financial wherewithal.

In the case of the Fellowship Programme, 16 up-and-coming publishing professionals from 13 countries have spent a month in Germany learning about the German book trade, culminating in the Frankfurt Book Fair itself.

The 25 publishers brought to Germany as part of the Invitation Programme are generally those from less-developed book markets—from Africa, Asia, Latin America, Central and Eastern Europe—who otherwise would struggle to exhibit at the Fair. The Frankfurt Book Fair and Germany’s Federal Foreign Office fund their visit to the fair, and also provide them with exhibition space (in Hall 5.0 E 926).

Talking to one Egyptian publisher on the river cruise gave me not only a sense of the challenges book publishers in that country face, but also put the complaints of some western publishers in some perspective. Egypt has no supply chain for books as such, and few general bookshops. Publishers sell their own books through their own retail outlets and sometimes sell the books of other publishers through largely ad hoc arrangements. There is no review culture for books, and so books sell principally by word-of-mouth. In spite of this, the American University in Cairo Press had great success with Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building. Aswany, now published around the world, was also on the boat.

Neither the Fellowship or Invitation Programme are as well known as they could be. Those lucky enough to participate in the programmes say they derive an enormous amount of professional and personal enjoyment from them. If you’re not at Frankfurt this year, perhaps you should be thinking of applying to one of these programmes for 2009.