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Letters

We’ll Always Have Frankfurt

I read Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s account of the 2008 Frankfurt Book Fair with amusement, bemusement, and some degree of admiration [“The Last Book Party,” Letter, March]. Having been there and done that more than a few times, I thought the piece caught nicely, and with weary elegance, the overwhelmingness of the Fair and the combination of plan and happenstance and overextension that its enormous scale produces. You meet someone here and end up at a dinner with him there. You talk to a Dutch publisher about a first novel and she sends over a French editor to tell you more about it and the French editor sells you a book instead. Lewis-Kraus’s anecdotes and analyses lay out the fundamental tensions of the book business today: literary prestige against commercial demands; bonhomie against predation; the element of luck against corporate profit goals; business meetings against primate rituals; actual authorship against publishers’ prideful appropriation. (Does the author’s own name contain the literary tension between Jews and Gentiles he distills in his reference to Mailer?)

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