In the junk zone
When the junk piles up in the living room at home, it wanders behind the closed doors of the storage room.
What you don't see - hobby philosophers know that - basically doesn't exist.
At the book fair, on the other hand, you show things.
Not just literature.
Also trinkets.
And garbage.
In Hall 4, where international exhibitors are housed, blue rubbish bags are lying around next to a door (“American Beauty” -like elevations are prohibited!) - spiced up by dustbugs and shavings of an indeterminable kind.
For all misery tourists who want to stop by: The still life, illuminated in nice cold neon light, is in the blind corner of the hall, to the right of it the visitor (the singular is crucial here) should find peace.
"Relax" is written in red letters on the wall.
In front of it a single chair, a single table, a single garbage can.
Opposite this comfort zone there is a freight elevator and a fire extinguisher.
Location scouts, please listen up: If a location is being sought for the next loveless “Tatort” final - Frankfurt Book Fair, Hall 4, heureka!
(span.)
Towards summer
It is not the first book fair at which no book is available in German from the newly elected winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature; Last year it was the same in the case of the poet Louise Glück. But at least the Penguin Verlag announced during this fair that the work of the Tanzanian writer Abdulrazak Gurnah would in future be published by him in a German translation. Immediately after the announcement of the previously unknown prize winner, there had been a real battle between German publishers over these rights.
The Penguin publisher Britta Egetemeier told the FAZ at the booth of her publisher that they were also trying to obtain the translation rights for those Gurnah titles that had previously been translated into German, and that they wanted to gradually re-publish them in a revised form, the first in December.
Gurnah's most recent novel “Afterlives” (published in English in 2020) will then come “Towards Summer 2022” in German.
(wiel.)
Gallery of horror
For many years the calendar gallery on the mezzanine level of Hall 3 was a fixed point of the book fair because it was quiet: an infinite tube over the full width of the complex, hung on both sides with calendars for the coming year, including the current winners of the calendar price of the German book trade (which is all gives). This time this presentation has moved to the ground floor of the actual hall in order to get it full. Quiet is less here, but a look at the calendar is always worthwhile.
My recommendation: "monthly insults" by Sarah Schmidt (texts) and Katharina Greve (drawings).
On the first of every month you get really let off steam over the next four weeks.
Only the former calendar gallery lies still and is silent.
For this, one reads for the first time the names of the conference rooms to which she grants access: Effect, Exposé, Extract, Complex, Compact.
And on the other hand: argument, speaking, aspect, fragment, facet, repertoire, result, response, respect.
Again: respect.
(apl.)
Throw the book
Book fairs are tough tests for the propensity for books. Which is why it is not far off to relax in between at bookless stands. So for a round in the corner of the non-books, where this year you can find some things that were more likely to be found outdoors in earlier years. Magnets, stationery, pegging games and hand-flattering wooden buttons cannot really interest us. And before the soaps and beeswax cloths for storing food, the question of what the connection to the book still looks like becomes all the more virulent.
And the pretty little cardboard room boomerangs?
They may contain a hint for designers: the book, or should we say more generally: the body of text that is thrown into the corner, from which it promptly returns.
Actually a nightmare.
From which you can then recover in hot water with a plasticized "tub book".
For example with “Goethe erotisch”, “read guaranteed in fifteen minutes”.
But that brings you back to the books.
(hmay.)