Academics love text and talk, so you can imagine what it’s like for a professor to visit the largest book fair in the world, the Frankfurt Book Fair (Frankfurter Buchmesse) where it’s all talk about books for 5 days. The fair is so huge that it takes up several floors of one building and spreads out to 5 other buildings as well as the venue having its own train stop! The massive exhibition of new books and book related items (cards, calendars, DVDs, horbuchs [audio books], art work and swag) is meant primarily for booksellers, publishers, librarians and other book-type professionals, but it opens its doors to the public on the weekends. Authors, TV stars, and the press show up in large numbers too, along with Google reps and genre fans (Harry Potter and Manga being two favorites). Photos from the fair can be seen at the official website .

       Of course, these days many books are digital, so there were plenty of e-books and e-book readers on display including the one from Sony and Amazon’s Kindle. Andrew Weinstein from Google’s New York office talked about trends in e-books and was emphatic that these are the good reads of the future. He counseled the big crowd at his session to jump in and try an e-book. He said not to worry about which format to use – it’s not clear which format will be the favorite, he said that will sort itself out in time. “Get in the e-book water and swim!” Weinstein said.

 Each year there is a “guest of honor,” and this year it was Turkey. That means that Turkish authors and artists were featured with many Turkish cultural displays and demonstrations. There were even special programs at the Frankfurt Public Library featuring Turkish books and authors. Next year the guest of honor will be China. 

LIS at the Fair

Students from the Darmstadt University of Applied Sciences who worked with our own Michael Lesk in spring semester 2008 (Christoph Schwarz and Jochen Rupp) were there and helped me navigate through the exhibition. Each German LIS school had a booth where students and faculty could talk with visitors. It was impressive to see the new programs being offered at the universities, such as,

Mikhail Gorbachev

      Along with other celebrities, Nobel prize winner, Mikhail Gorbachev was there taking questions from a journalist with Q & A’s being translated into English. Gorbachev is currently the president of the Gorbachev Foundation. His publisher -- Ves Mir -- is compiling and printing Gorbachev’s collected works in a 22 volume series with the first 2 books due out in August 2009. Gorbachev was impressive in the intelligent, quick and witty way he answered each question. He recounted a meeting he had with Ronald Reagan where Reagan began the exchange by lecturing Mr. Gorbachev. He (MG) in turn said “Mr. Reagan, I am not a schoolboy, and you are not the schoolmaster; I am not the defendant, and you are not the prosecutor. If we are to achieve great things, we must be equals.” At a meeting in Geneva, Gorbachev said that Reagan was a real dinosaur, and Reagan called Gorbachev a “diehard Bolshevik.” Mr. Gorbachev was extremely annoyed by the Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI) proposal laid out by President Reagan, and he referred to it as Reagan’s “love child” and as his “brain child.” It was obvious that these two men were each other’s nemesis, and Mikhail Gorbachev used the international stage of the book fair to present his views. He admired President John F. Kennedy, though, and quoted him as saying “Although we are against the Soviet Union and Communism, we must not demonize the Russian people who want peace as much as we do.” The stories Mr. Gorbachev told were teasers intended to elicit interest in the large effort to publish his collected works.

Other impressions and tidbits of the Buchmesse: 

Professor Elke Lang kindly introduced me to many of the academics participating in the book fair all of whom seemed to be in their element, smiling and enjoying the celebration of books.