The napkin-wrapped bottle of wine Boris Yeltsin used to fill his glass contained grape juice
Published 30 October 2000
Tuesday morning and it's the Frankfurt Book Fair. It's hard to imagine that I have spent 33 weeks in Frankfurt, more than half a year of my life. The city has been under construction ever since I first visited in the Sixties, and I still cannot find my way around its grotesque one-way system. And despite the many gleaming steel and glass towers erected to celebrate the arrival of the European Central Bank, it remains one of the world's most anonymous cities. But this unprepossessing place has been the setting for some of book publishing's most exciting moments, and every year hosts a fair characterised by both unrelenting hard work and endless - sometimes glamorous! - partying. For me, the Frankfurt Book Fair in a good year is everything I love about publishing.
I spent the Thursday evening of the fair shepherding my client Paul Eddy around the Frankfurt action. First, we went to a formal dinner for Boris Yeltsin, given by his agent Andrew Nurnberg at Frankfurt's only really good hotel, the Hessischerhof. The dinner was called for 7pm because Boris Nikolayevich wanted an early night. As the guests entered, each was ceremoniously given a copy of Yeltsin's new book, Midnight Diaries - in Russian - signed by the great man himself. And then, when we had all assembled and waited long enough, he made his entrance. And quite an entrance it was.
Here, despite the puffy face and tentative gait, was a strong whiff of power. Yeltsin seems to have pulled off one of the best political deals ever. He retired from the presidency of Russia, but has clearly remained the president in terms of the panoply and trappings of office: masses of bodyguards, translators, retainers, all flown from Moscow to Frankfurt in the presidential jet. And no questions asked by President Putin about Swiss accounts or other dubious practices. At dinner, speeches were made and Yeltsin proposed (and drank) many toasts. I found out, however, that the napkin-wrapped bottle of wine used to fill his glass contained grape juice . . . and that he has not had an alcoholic drink for years. After Yeltsin, I took Paul Eddy to the Frankfurterhof Hotel for a Dutch publishing party, where an Israeli editor tried to tell us that it was an Arab bullet that had done for the 12-year-old Palestinian we had all seen killed on television.
Then we went into the Frankfurterhof bar, sometimes referred to as "the snake-pit". It was a seething mass of publishing personnel drinking the night away, looking for all the world like a Chapman brothers sculpture or a Bosch painting. Eddy pronounced the whole thing "crazy" and asked me whether anything resembling real business ever got done at the Frankfurt Fair. I had to tell him, in all honesty, that it did . . .
I had the unusual task of selling both electronic and conventional print rights in Frederick Forsyth's new book of stories, Quintet. Freddie, a man who still writes his books on a typewriter, insisted on original electronic publication, so we made a deal for the English language e-rights with a small London-based electronic publisher, Online Originals. Having retained foreign language rights, we were free to make deals for both e-rights and what we now call p-rights (conventionally printed books) at the Frankfurt Fair. Several territories were sold at the fair, including one - Holland - where the price for the e-rights exceeded the price for the p-rights. The shape of things to come?
Why, in an age of instant electronic communication, do publishers flock annually to Frankfurt? It is not just to make a few rights sales (that can be done as efficiently from one's office), but really to make and foster relationships within the international publishing community. Over the years, these relationships bear fruit. A phone call to a pal in, for example, Stockholm results in a quick read and then the purchase of Swedish rights; an editor in New York saves his or her hot book for a special friend in London. Like all media businesses, it's all about who - not what - you know. And Frankfurt speaks very much to that need.
Earlier this month, Miramax snapped up both film and US book rights to a children's book we had. Artemis Fowl, by Eoin Colfer, is a fantasy about a 12-year-old master criminal. The news that Harvey Weinstein and Tina Brown were enthusiastically involved was enough to bring a small stampede of foreign publishers to our table in the agents centre, and we sold the rights in eight countries on the spot.
For a select few, one of the highlights of the fair is the Holzbrinck lunch, which takes place every Friday in a panelled room high up in the Deutsche Bank building, from which the view extends more or less to Paris. During the cocktails, there was much speculation among the elite invitees on whether or not Dieter von Holzbrinck would refer, in his speech, to the mass firings and general contradiction within his German publishing empire this year. He didn't. Instead, he named the "Book of the Year" Harry Potter and the "Author of the Year" William Shakespeare. Not very controversial.
Sunday. I stop at the desk of the Hessischerhof and leave an envelope stuffed with money for the staff and a note to Kohler, the manager, asking for my room again next year. Just another Frankfurt addict. But don't pity me: I adore it.
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