Focus on the excursion to the Frankfurt Book Fair.
First stop en route to Frankfurt. (19 Nov. 2005)
It was slightly raining when the 16 students and three of the professors of the Book and Byte department departed from the Moorse Poort for Frankfurt. We had all heard of it, of its long history, of its reputation and of its role in the book business. But we had only heard! We needed also to see by ourselves what it looked like and what was going on there. This is what we did. We left theory in Leiden to go and spend three nights and two days the Book was born, which happens also to be not far from our ultimate rendezvous, Frankfurt.
From hearing to seeing.
After more than nine hours on the road, we reached Mainz, a beautiful city on both banks of the Rhine. We were all tired and it was raining cats and dogs but this was not an excuse not to quench our thirst by visiting the Gutenberg Museum.
Marcus Cicero said in his De Oratore that to theory should be associated practice and to philosophy rhetoric. After two months of intense courses on the history of the book, our minds were saturated with theories which needed practice to be digestible. Gutenberg’s 42-line Bible became reality when I saw it in the Mainz museum that bears his name.
Synthesis of what the ear heard in Leiden and what the eye saw in Gutenberg Museum (19 Nov. 2005)
My seeing the privileges, those "holy tickets" that secured one’s seat in Paradise, as designed and printed by Gutenberg himself, will remain engraved in my memory for a long time, if not forever. The printing press became reality when detailed demonstration was provided step by step by a Museum guide.
The visit to the Gutenberg Museum gave shape and flesh to the two-month theory we had absorbed. I had been taught about monotypes and linotypes, formes, stereotypes,… but all these had remained a kind of dead and abstract knowledge until the demonstrations of the Museum’s guides gave them life.
Immense Fair
The image I had of the Frankfurt Book Fair was the one of a very large room where books are exhibited. The reality is different. The big complex where books are exhibited is simply impossible to visit in the few hours we had to spend there. Many are those who found themselves in the same place many times despite the complex’ map they had. Those who had particular interest in specific areas had an easier task. I was among those who were interested in all, all about the fair to have a global picture of it.
The immense Frankfurt exhibition complex gives an idea of what takes place inside.(20 Nov. 2005)
I was impressed by the number of publishers from all over the world who were present. Big and small names were all there with their publications. Black suited and neck tied men, certainly publishers and their reps and agents- were omnipresent in the corridors, behind the counters and in the various places set for business meetings. I wondered what those people were talking about. It seems that they were negotiating contracts, offering services and making their publications and services known in faraway places.
"We are here to meet and discuss with our customers with a possibility of signing deals an negotiating about discounts", Lennie a former Leiden student working for Brill told us. As for Patrick a British child book author based in Taiwan, he was in Frankfurt to try and catch the attention of publishers on his child books. "Most of them say they have no time or cancel the appointment because they had a more interesting one”, he told us in a discussion. “This is the place where big deals are signed", Teddy Shin, international director of [South-Korean] Chong-A Printing Co. told me.
Korean Novelties
Korea was the guest of honour for this year’s fair. Thus, my curiosity was to know what was so special about the book trade in this part of the world. I was amazed to realise that not only the alphabet was different, but also the book design was enormously different.
South Koreans brought novelties that in the long run may revolutionise book design and typography. (20 Nov. 2005)
Teddy Shin told me that a study carried out in South Korea in 2000 had come to a number of conclusions. The most interesting one is the colouring of pages to tell the reader the importance of each paragraph in the book. "A paragraph with a yellow background contains a very important message, followed by red", Shin said, a dding that the traditional white colour had proved to be confusing. Therefore, only paragraphs with less important messages have a white background. “We are different from other countries”, concluded proudly Shin, who said the new design had caught the interest of big names. Who knows? Paper, printing, the compass, the list is long, all originated from south eastern Asia. What the west did was to improve and commercialise the south-eastern Asians’ inventions. Let us give time to time.
The oldest, the most expensive
Since my prime interest was on every thing, I just stopped to the stands where I saw something special, something that I do not see very frequently. Old books are such rare items especially in Leiden where we only see them behind the showcases (except in Biblitheca Tysiana). Antiquarians had their own room in Frankfurt to exhibit their books most of which dated back to between the 15th-19th centuries.
Flora Londinensis (1777), by Curtis William with its 432 hand-coloured engraved plates (20 Nov. 2005)
From the prices I saw in Frankfurt – ranging from € 1,000 for the cheapest to €100,000 for the most expensive, I understood why those books, most of which we cannot even read and understand, were kept not on shelves but in armoured showcases. .
At the stand of British-based Bernard Shapero, I was told that old books were a prosperous business. At this moment, the man behind the counter said, many rich Russians are buying 18th and 19th century books about their country. He said this was the case for Turkey in the 1990s.
With this very instructive excursion to Mainz and Frankfurt not only did the theories absorbed in our classes take shape, but also new ideas emerged as to what our place and role could be in the book trade after the completion the Book and Byte programme.
Acknowledgements
I am most thankful to
the University Assistance Fund (UAF),
which sponsored my trip to Frankfurt.BACK TO HOME PAGE
BACK TO BOOK HOME PAGE
