Cindy-Lou Dale

Frankfurt am Main exudes a sophisticated elegance and panache. The city’s chic architecture and silhouette of banking skyscrapers has become the city’s unofficial symbol of success. Frankfurt is home to the German Stock Exchange, the European Central Bank, the Deutsche Bundesbank and more than 300 financial institutions from around the world, making this 1200-year-old city of commerce one of Europe’s foremost financial centres. Frankfurt has a global reputation as a nucleus of trade and commerce with more than 44,000 businesses having representation and branch offices in Frankfurt, while twenty of Germany’s top-100 company’s are headquartered in the metropolitan area.

 

Thanks to its favourable traffic connections, Frankfurt is also one of Europe’s oldest trading centres. The first trade fairs are known to have taken place as early as the 11^th century. Now Frankfurt is one of the worlds’ most significant trade fair locations. Kaiser Friedrich II declared it to be the first trade fair city by way of imperial privilege in 1240. Today, over two-million people travel to Frankfurt every year to visit one of the over fifty international trade shows.

 

The exposition grounds, west of the city, provide these enormous trade fairs with 475,000 square metres of exhibition space in ten large halls. One of the best-known and most popular of which is the Frankfurt Book Fair.

 

“With a turnover of about US$-88 billion, the global publishing industry is the world’s largest creative trade, which is greater than the combined sales of videos, DVDs, CDs, computer games and online music,” said International Publisher Association president, Ana Maria Caballena at the opening press conference at the Frankfurt Book Fair.

 

In celebration of literature and a 500-year old Frankfurt tradition, the city again hosted the biggest book fair in the world. In 2006 Frankfurt Book Fair convention centre packed a 172,000 square metre area with literature, culture and debate, drawing near 300,000 visitors to more than 380,000 published titles from over 113 countries; closing an estimated 600-million euros worth of business deals. Without a doubt, the Frankfurt Book Fair is the world’s leading market-place for ideas, books, electronic media and the international rights trade.

 

Thousands of eager readers, networkers and knowledge-seekers met up in Frankfurt in early October, a time when the whole city revolves around the Book Fair. For the international book and media industry, this is also the literary event of each year, and an important arena for cultural and political dialogue. Everyone who is anyone in the industry was there: authors, publishers, booksellers and librarians, art dealers and illustrators, agents and journalists, information brokers and readers.

 

Whilst the Fair concentrates on trade-visitors and business deals from Wednesday to Friday, it opened to the general public on its last two days, presenting a huge programme of cultural and educational events. Readings, discussions and talks were on offer at the 7,272 exhibition stands, covering a diversity of subjects in books and other forms of published products. In fact only around forty-three percent of the products on show were books.

The 2006 list of authors attending was illustrious: international bestselling authors such as Günter Grass, Donna Leon, Ken Follett, Vikram Seth, Zadie Smith, Frank Schätzing and Ilija Trojanov, alongside leading non-fiction authors from politics, the media and academia such as Wolf von Lojewski, Roger Willemsen, Dieter Grönemeyer and Alfred Biolek.

 

Speaking at the opening press conference of the Fair, director Juergen Boos stated that as from 2006 the Frankfurt Book Fair “would focus on education, learning and literacy”. As such, one of the Fair’s key focuses for 2006 was Education for the Future. About 1,300 exhibitors displayed educational products and as part of the literacy campaign well-known athletes, actors and authors read out text written from previously illiterate people they had sponsored.

One of the highlights of the Book Fair was the presentation given by the 2006 cultural giant and Guest of Honour - India. Their presentation was swathed in gloriously colourful arrays of Indian arts and crafts, traditional costumed exhibitors dressed in vibrant saris.

 

With a population of over 1-billion and 24 official languages, India publishes around 80,000 new books each year to an estimated 600-million potential readers. Some 150 publishing companies and more than 70 Indian authors were present at the 2006 Frankfurt Book Fair, among them such well-known names as Amitav Ghosh and Amit Chaudhuri.

 

This year’s top exhibitor was again Germany with 3,288, followed by the United Kingdom’s 803, the United States with 676, Italy with 279 and Spain with 250. Representation by China had almost doubled, while Thailand and Taiwan had grown by 40% and Japan by 20%. The Guest of Honour for the 2007 event will be the Catalan Culture of Spain.

 

Even though Frankfurt boasts more than 180 hotels with 30,500 beds, few are available during such trade events – unless booked well in advance, so check the Frankfurt Tourism office’s trade show calendar of events before planning your trip. www.frankfurt-tourismus.de.

 

 

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