Once it seemed to be a representation of all knowledge, at least as it was understood in any given year. Thousands of voices, in language after language, presenting the latest reference work or literary sensation, the newest theory of gender development or the plight of the Amazon (the wet one), ideas for rethinking the global flow of capital or the best ways to live simply. Frankfurt: It’s the Grossvater of all book fairs.
Maybe Frankfurt is more a Babel than a Noah’s ark. It’s certainly a cacophony — polyphony is too organized a trope — that reflects the reality of thinking, researching, writing, and publishing.
This year’s Frankfurt Book Fair did once again what it has long done, commanding the presence of the global publishing industry at what the organizers proclaimed “The Place to Be.” The slogan, which is not accidentally in English, is tricked out in a display format that calls to mind the old Vegas Strip. The subtitle reads: “Frankfurter Buchmesse: Welthauptstadt der Ideen” — Frankfurt Book Fair: World Capital of Ideas.
The fair, with its vast clockless arenas, is centered in four gigantic three-level halls. Smaller than it used to be, it’s still a beehive or a maze or a Dantean journey, depending on your role and the condition of your feet. This year saw 277,000 visitors, and I’m sure I passed all of them.
Large as it is, though, this is a chastened Frankfurt. Global consolidations, the cost of exhibition, market erosions, and the wide-ranging effects of digital everything have humbled an industry for which Frankfurt remains iconic. It’s at least the world capital of the idea of publishing, a vast church whose members are devout agnostics.
Digital is now the name for much of what publishers are doing, not the cry of the barbarians at the gates.
A long generation ago, Frankfurt was sterner, starrier, and more self-regarding. At the entrance to an exhibition you heard a vendor’s cry — “Zigaretten, Zigarren, Trauben” (cigarettes, cigars, grapes) — as you passed into a nicotine cloud. I always wondered if the grapes were meant as a breath freshener. Suits were the order of the day. This year I noticed casual attire and manbuns.
One of the fair’s most-hyped events was an appearance by David Hockney, promoting his oversized Taschen book, titled A Bigger Book. At the Taschen stand, a representative, wearing white gloves, was turning pages of a display copy as if it were the Book of Kells.
Which seemed right. The fair offers many views of what “the book” is, even if you can’t read that book. There was considerable interest in the forthcoming high-end facsimile of the Voynich Manuscript, the famous, never-decoded book of script and illustrated plants. The Spanish publishing house Siloe will print 898 copies. You may order one for around seven thousand euros. Please let me know what it says. Other European houses were presenting remarkable facsimiles of archival riches, as if to demonstrate that the purpose of new technology was, at least in part, to anchor the book even more firmly in our consciousness.
Many exhibits are corporate, focusing on textbooks, reference, and consolidations of data. The ProQuest stand announced its motto in a red banner line: “Empowering researchers and information seekers to discover, grow and thrive.” Having worked for a large U.K.-based empowerer of researchers and information seekers, I could almost hear the board meeting at which those words were hammered out, scrupulous to avoid mention of any format (though I did wince at the absence of the Oxford comma).
Frankfurt is the place where knowledge and information produce neologisms at an alarming rate. At the display for Clarivate Analytics, you met three terms — trust, solutions, ingenuity — stacked in capital letters, each followed by an emphatic period. The firm’s brands — ScholarOne, Web of Science, InCites — apparently converge to make the company “Your partner in accelerating research.” Four critically selected words.
By comparison, the world of the university press feels handcrafted — the skinny decaf soy latte in contrast to the scientifically developed nutritional beverage you can’t quite identify.
A short visit to Frankfurt was hardly enough time but also too much. No one could be interested in everything. I wanted to know what was different, especially for the university-press world. Had scholarly publishing gone through the looking glass into the digital future?
The world of university presses is a loose consortium based on principles of scholarly values — which doesn’t mean that a university press doesn’t have to be run as much like a business as possible, especially now that every new chancellor is given a desk, a budget, and a hatchet. Frankfurt is university-press business. Though less glamorous than the giant exhibits, the stand of Combined Academic Publishers — the name has an awkward charm — offered safe harbor and functioned as a home base for 13 Canadian and American university presses.
Peter Berkery, executive director of the Association of American University Presses, organized a half-day event focusing on university-press issues. The overarching consensus: The digital is no longer the looming monster that stalked the Frankfurt exhibition halls only a few years ago. John Thompson, a professor of sociology at the University of Cambridge and a longtime analyst of academic publishing, spoke of the current moment as one not of new forms but of new formats. The qualification is important, especially for scholars beyond the STEM quadriga, anxious that the tech chariot doesn’t run them down. If the format of the book — layout, access, delivery, interface — is what we’re really talking about when we talk about digital, then the book as a form for thinking remains a potent marker within academic life. Digital is now the name for much of what publishers are doing, not the cry of the barbarians at the gates.
That may be good news, but it isn’t all the news. Open access — now a familiar desideratum in the journals world — presents unique challenges for books, which operate on different funding and consumption models. All those I asked said their houses were watching carefully what is called “evidence-based acquisitions,” a term of art to describe usage as a rationale for libraries’ purchasing decisions.
We frequently hear critiques of neoliberalism’s effect on higher education, and there is at least some suspicion that “evidence-based acquisition” is undergirded by similar principles. Caveat lector: Universities, colleges, scholars, and the broadest possible nonscholarly readership have needs as diverse and complex as the world they inhabit.
Some problems and concerns are, while not simple, at least easier to explain. Garrett Kiely, director of the University of Chicago Press, was one of several publishing veterans who pointed to online piracy as a fact of modern life. For university presses, whose model and scale of operation are dramatically different from those of textbook publishers and purveyors of aggregated “information,” every scanned book still in copyright that appears on the web, even with the intention of saving students money, erodes the fragile financial base on which scholarly publishers do their work. A company called Digimarc provides the service of scanning the web to find a publisher’s works and has them taken down if they have been posted without license. Another cost of doing business.
Wandering from display to Wi-Fi hot spot to sandwich bar, I heard a good deal about Amazon’s anaconda-like ingestion of the book trade, and how the online retailer is now the single largest client of university presses. When Amazon has a soft month, so do university presses. Not an easy message to deliver to the provost’s office.
In the universe of publishing, university presses do God’s work. I saw beautiful catalogs from the university presses at Fordham and NYU, handsome text design from Nebraska. More books looked shorter, making them more economical in terms of both production costs and the reader’s time. Much scholarly publishing remains monographic, a term that gets used widely but inconsistently. Bill Sisler, director at Harvard University Press, gave me a good working definition: A monograph is a work by a single author on a single subject for a single set of readers. Much depends on that last element, and reaching that single set of readers has never been more challenging.
Where are monographs going? Where are scholarly books in any format going? The answers are tough and partial. Many publishers report seeing hardback monograph sales slip below 200 copies; sales of hardbacks on simultaneous (hardback plus paperback) editions can run as low as 75 copies. You read that right. Yet as these numbers drop year by year, the technology for print on demand allows publishers to contain inventory and warehousing costs and still satisfy the small but important market that keeps teachers teaching, thinkers thinking, and scholars, um, scholaring.
I still wanted to know why, in 2016, university presses found an expensive proposition like Frankfurt worth the investment. Gillian Berchowitz, director at Ohio University Press, underscored some truths about the fair. No matter what you’ve told yourself about a new book, there is nothing like presenting it, or hearing it presented, face-to-face, to a neutral third party. Frankfurt may be a frantic arena, but it fosters those quiet and illuminating moments when a book becomes visible in a new way. Frankfurt is, then, where publishers and editors and marketers have a moment outside the busy bubble that can be its own form of provincialism. Or as Berchowitz put it, Frankfurt is for learning “how to make us worldly.”
Like Brigadoon — or any academic meeting’s book display — Frankfurt disappears and leaves us to make sense of what happened there. I’m not persuaded that ideas can have a world capital — we’re too dispersed, too postcolonial for that — but Frankfurt is still a node of extraordinary value within a network that shapes everything we do.
