Fairs
PSA: Next Monday Baylor’s Institute for the Studies of Religion will be hosting a conversation between David Brooks and me on his recent (and maybe forthcoming) work. If you’re a Waco local, you may register for the event here — seating is limited! And if you’re not local, the event will be livestreamed. The page linked above should give you another link to the stream, when the time comes. I’ll update this information in next week’s newsletter.
Recently I got an email from my agent’s office — and just so you know, Christy Fletcher is the agent than whom no more wonderful can be conceived — asking me for the most recent version of the manuscript of the book I am currently writing. The reason? Soon they’ll be seeking to sell overseas rights, primarily translation rights, at the Frankfurter Buchmesse — The Frankfurt Book Fair — and they want to show it around.
The picture above is a recent one, but here’s an image from 1977:
In Europe, Trade fairs — exhibitions of goods produced by some particular industry — go back to the Middle Ages, and it is not coincidental that the Frankfurt Book Fair began in 1454, not long after a man named Gutenberg in nearby Mainz began printing books using moveable type. There have been periods — most of them involving war — when Frankfurt couldn’t hold its book fair, and for a time in the 18th century the fair in Leipzig was the bigger deal for booksellers. But for most of the past 500 years Frankfurt has been the place where books, and book contracts, are sold and bought.
It’s sort of amazing to me that in our age of instantaneous digital communication, international book deals are still largely made through face-to-face negotiations in the same German city, year after year. Yet so it is. Thank you, Herr Gutenberg. Also for that Bible of yours, and the typographical reformation you inaugurated.
Another European city known for its trade fairs is Barcelona, and as it happens one of the masterpieces of relatively recent cinema centers on the trade-fair world there: Whit Stillman’s wise and witty Barcelona. If you haven’t seen it, run, don't walk, to the nearest TV screen.
STATUS BOARD
- Work: Still having fun with that old joker Rousseau.
- Music: Listening to Monk’s Dream over and over and over ...
- Reading: Re-reading the first three books of Dave Hutchinson’s amazing Fractured Europe series in preparation for reading the fourth and final volume.
- Food and Drink: Huel, basically.