He had to improvise, says the Dresden painter and entertainer Falk Töpfer, after all he had only been there for two weeks.

Now he is wearing a purple suit with a matching tie, is supposed to greet the guests and, above all, make sure that they leave the hall two hours later.

Tilman Spreckelsen

Editor in the Feuilleton.

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Töpfer's charm in fulfilling this task is a central building block in the hygiene concept of the "popup book fair", which opened yesterday at noon in Leipzig.

It provides that the total of five thousand visitors who are expected by Sunday will use specific slots for this, with breaks for ventilation.

The interest is great, the visitor tickets are almost sold out.

The day before, while the books were still waiting in large boxes in the corners of the hall, two camera teams visited the Leipzig cultural center "Werk 2", where the book show is taking place: a collection of brick buildings lined up around a narrow, cobblestone courtyard.

There is a glass blowing workshop, a pub, a computer club for seniors is also housed here, and bands also play in Hall A, which now houses the fair.

When the Leipzig Book Fair had to announce in early February that it would be canceled for the third time in a row, Gunnar Cynybulk and Leif Greinus got together.

Cynybulk managed the publishing houses Aufbau and Ullstein before founding Kanon Verlag in 2020, Leif Greinus heads the Dresden publishing house Voland & Quist.

Together they looked for a venue for an alternative book show and advertised for participants.

There were 120 registrations in 48 hours, a little later there were 150, according to Cynybulk.

They got a good 60 publishers, nothing compared to the book fair in Frankfurt with 7000 exhibitors in normal years.

Only those who had kept their booking for the regular trade fair up to the end were taken into account here.

Without a big strategy

Inside you can expect stands that are lined up next to each other without much effort.

The tables are uniformly two meters wide and one meter deep, so that the distance between exhibitors and customers is maintained.

Uniform signs name the names of the publishers.

"We wanted to shorten the time until the next Frankfurt Book Fair," says Greinus, "so everything here was created ad hoc, without a great strategy." first visitors are already in the hall fits into the concept.

But it is also egalitarian, almost all publishers get the same space of a standardized table surface, although the five largest publishers each take up three tables, and some small ones also share the two running meters.

Curiously enough, the range of products on offer is hardly noticed less than at the usual trade fairs, and when there is more space, as is the case with Hanser or Beck, one is amazed at how ostentatious a six meter wide stand suddenly appears.

Nice, but please not again!

In any case, the discussion that regularly takes place at the major trade fairs in Leipzig and Frankfurt about the participation of right-wing extremist publishers plays no role here from the outset.

Their presence would also be difficult here: Right at the entrance, a sign draws the attention of “dear guests” to the fact that, according to the house rules, “wearing symbols and brands that are right-wing extremist, racist, discriminatory, sexist and glorify violence” leads to eviction.

Cynybulk and Greinus decided that those who don't wear such things on their chests and align their publishing program accordingly cannot take part, because the event is curated to a much greater extent than the large trade fairs.

With sixty exhibitors, it is not difficult to know their programs.

Especially when, as Cynybulk says,

Two hours is quite enough to see everything, even the backyard with the food truck and bar tables is quickly crossed, and because there is an interesting reading program on the site every half hour, you stay a little longer.

Of course, none of this is a substitute for the fair, not even remotely so.

It's not supposed to be.

"We have decided not to carry out this pop-up a second time," says Greinus.

"Unless we're forced to." Let's hope not.