Frankfurt, Germany: home of apple wine, herby green sauce, the European Central Bank and … the best late-night bashes in the book business?
It was a surprise to Bob Dylan, too. But if, like many of the publishers who attended this year’s Frankfurt Book Fair, you’ve tuned into the new HBO show “Youth,” you already know.
Frankfurt may not have Berlin’s international reputation for culture, but it held its first book fair in the 15th century, around two decades after Johannes Gutenberg invented his movable-type printing press. Each October, book publishers, literary agents and book, film and TV scouts head there for a week of brisk business with their international colleagues.
And they like to let their hair down.
An elegant, 150-year-old hotel named the Steigenberger Icon Frankfurter Hof — publishing people just call it “the Hof” — has been the epicenter of the fair for the better part of a century.
Stefan René Lange, who manages the hotel bar and restaurant, said he has worked there for 19 book fairs. The days around the fair are the hotel’s busiest each year, he said, and the throngs sometimes include as many as 700 people, forcing his staff to set up a temporary second bar in the lobby.
“I have so many stories,” Lange said, “but I can’t tell any names.” (He hasn’t ruled out writing a memoir. It’s a good thing he knows some publishers.)
Socializing doesn’t take place only at the Hof. German publishing houses throw festive parties, as do out-of-town publishers. They often rent venues like Bar Shuka, which is on a gritty block just around the corner from Frankfurt’s central train station and was the scene of one of the fair’s most anticipated fêtes this fall.
A mainstay of both the Frankfurt and London book fairs is a jazz show put on by the Editörial Standards, held last Wednesday at a nightclub called FourSnacks, just down the way from the Hof.
The group, which is made up of book people from both sides of the Atlantic, evokes the Rock Bottom Remainders while trading Stephen King’s rhythm guitar for some tight major seventh chords. (Yes, they play “I Could Write a Book.”)
The musicians see plenty of parallels between their day jobs and their after-hours gigs. Sam Edenborough, the group’s tenor saxophonist and the rights director at London’s Greyhound Literary, compared jazz improvisation to “pitching books to each other.” Hayo Deinum, the bassist and a foreign rights manager at Shared Stories in the Netherlands, said he’s even “made deals through playing in the band.”
A 10-minute walk away, at a jam-packed Bar Shuka, hundreds cut a rug to grooves laid down by Ricardo Teperman, the publisher of Zahar, an imprint of the Brazilian publishing house Companhia das Letras. His playlist featured Brazilian styles ranging from samba-reggae to funk carioca, plus tracks from Puerto Rico and Angola and a little Missy Elliott and Madonna for good measure.
“There’s been some more interest in both fiction and nonfiction published by countries in the global south” in recent years, Teperman said. “Somehow, music attracts people’s interest first.”
While that may be true, plenty of the publishing people packing the bar for the “Shake at Shuka” were talking about literature in between stretches on the dance floor. But some of the event’s organizers were more preoccupied with politics given Brazil’s recent presidential election, which went into a runoff.
“Everybody’s stressed,” said Fernanda Diamant, a founder of the independent publishing house Fósforo. Still, the evening gave them a brief chance to unwind.
“In Brazil, we know how to give parties,” Diamant said. “We know how to make people dance.”
The next night, many of the same faces were seen in the nightclub Romantika at a dance party held by the publishing house Canongate, which is based in Edinburgh and London. The Grove Atlantic deputy publisher Peter Blackstock, spotted outside Shuka at 1:30 a.m. the night before, was animatedly discussing a hot Moldovan book with the Dutch publisher Job Lisman 24 hours later.
Canongate’s chief executive, Jamie Byng, ran an Edinburgh nightclub in the mid-1990s before pivoting to publishing. By 1998, he was throwing an annual party in Frankfurt — and carrying along cases of vinyl records by EPMD, Blue Mitchell and more to make it happen.
“I love bringing people together,” Byng said, after stepping outside to cool down and chat with partygoers. “This party has developed a momentum — we don’t even put out an invitation for it.”
Byng believes it’s the power of connection, and not just “publishing best sellers,” that animates the book business.
“It’s about spreading the word about beautiful things, and connecting people, and broadening people’s minds — these things which I feel Frankfurt celebrates in a truly remarkable way, like no other fair I know of in the world,” he said.
Byng still had people boogieing down as 4 a.m. came around. Back at the Hof, however, people were winding down instead.
Christian Frederking, the group director for sales and business development at Thames & Hudson in Britain, settled into a wing chair with a beer around 2 a.m. on Friday. He had been celebrating his 60th birthday with his colleagues at a nearby bar, he said, and returned to the Hof for a nightcap.
“I come from a German publishing family, and I’ve come to the fair probably 35 times,” he said. “We meet so many people. It’s always been like that.”
In an era when book auctions are held regularly over email, it’s that sense of community that keeps the publishers coming back.
“I love this fair,” said Jakob Nilsson, a publisher at the Swedish publishing house Bokfabriken. “And I love the Hof — it’s the heart of the fair, in a sense. When that day comes, as it does for everyone, this is where my ashes should be spread. Where else?”
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