Frankfurt’s Juergen Boos on the International Perspective: ‘It’s Always Changing’

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From Publishing Perspectives:

As world book publishing’s 2019 conference and trade show season moves into high gear, the international industry’s players are traveling to and from the key events in a pattern that becomes familiar. With the London Book Fair as the first major anchor of the year–and the Frankfurter Buchmesse as the annual primary cultminating event–many this week are preparing for the Bologna Children’s Book Fair (April 1 to 4), and others have just returned from the Leipzig Book Fair.

Trade visitors at these international and regional events can number in the tens of thousands. In cases of public-facing events, hundreds of thousands may be in attendance.

And yet a far smaller group of directors are behind the most stable of the world’s great book industry events. You see them at each other’s venues regularly. For example, India’s Jaipur Festival featured a first visit from the Frankfurter Buchmesse’s Juergen Boos. And the London Book Fair’s Jacks Thomas is a regular guest at the United Arab Emirates’ Sharjah International Book Fair.

When Publishing Perspectives spoke with Thomas earlier this month ahead of this year’s trade show at Olympia London, one of the key points she made about the position of a major fair director had to do with the strain of Brexit and its deep uncertainties on the UK and European publishing industries. A trade show’s director, she said, of course cannot take a political position. “What you can do,” however, Thomas said, “is be very cognizant of the context in which we’re operating.” And to that end, the fair this year had plenty of cross-cultural programming, reflecting, as she put it, “what books do.”

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In a conversation with Publishing Perspectives during the London Book Fair about the view from his vantage point as one of the handful of major show directors in the world, however, one of the most interesting points Boos makes is that he and his colleagues who direct the international industry’s major fairs and festivals “do meet every second year, maybe 20 of us,” and of course they see each other in transit on planes, trains, and on the exhibition floors of the world.

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“If you look at Buenos Aires, for example,” Boos says, “there are hundreds of thousands of people coming” to the Feria del Libro. “It’s such an unstable country economically but the fair is so successful. We all have our different challenges.

“Frankfurt might be a bit different, in that we have so many tasks at the same time,” he says. “We run the show, we promote German culture abroad. Like the French, who have the book fair but have to reach out to the world at the same time.” This year, that meant back-to-back fairs in England, Livre Paris opening the day after the London Book Fair closed:  the ambassadorial element of the fairs’ activities can be among the most intensive parts of the directors’ work.

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Listening for a moment to the conversations passing the stand, Boos delivers one of his best lines in characteristic deadpan: “In the world’s book fairs, everybody has his own crisis.”

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“A literary publisher in the UK,” for example, will see something quite different from what a fair director based in Germany is tracking, where “We want to export our titles, and yet we do see a lot of reading English in Germany.”

“And our LitAg,” the international rights center at the Frankfurter Buchmesse, the heart of the world’s transactional licensing business, “is already booked out for this year,” Boos says, with Böhne’s confirmation–a complete sellout almost eight months before the fair and with a move this year to the Festhalle from Hall 6.3 as part of the renovation program “to give our agents and scouts the best possible infrastructure and experience.”

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“In Brazil, there’s the bankruptcy protection filings by two [bookselling] chains, but you see the independent bookstores doing  well. And look at Indonesia,” the London Book Fair’s Market Focus, “and at Vietnam. And at growth in the Middle East, just talk to Bodour” Al Qasimi, the Emirates Publishers Association president who has become vice-president of the International Publishers Association.

. . . .

“Our task,” Katja Böhne says, “is to combine these inputs from these markets to tell them all …”

Juergen Boos picks up her thought, “To tell them all there is hope.”

Link to the rest at Publishing Perspectives