The Long History of the Frankfurt Book Fair

More than 7,000 exhibitors from more than 100 countries are expected to participate in the Frankfurt Book Fair this year. The world’s largest annual book event, it is a celebration of literature that attracts attendees from all over the world. But it is also a center for business transactions for the wider literary economy.

What is the history of the Frankfurt Book Fair? Are the traditional gatekeepers of the book industry still in place? What is China’s current role in international book publishing?

These are just a few of the questions I asked in my recent conversation with Foreign policy economics columnist Adam Tooze on the radio show we co-host, Ones and twos. The following is an excerpt, edited for length and clarity. For the full conversation, search for Ones and twos Wherever you get your podcasts. And check out Adam’s Substack Newsletter.

Cameron Abadi: The Frankfurt Book Fair has its roots in 15th century Germany. How did it develop during that period, during many centuries of political and social turmoil in Germany?

Adam Tooze: So it’s really connected to the history of print capitalism and reform in Europe. People may know that Johannes Gutenberg, the originator of the western path of printing, achieved his great accomplishments in the 15th century in Mainz, just down the road from Frankfurt. In the 1560s, his business partners decided that Mainz was too small a place for them to push their business aggressively, so they moved to Frankfurt. Thus, from the 1560s onwards, Frankfurt became a printing centre.

By the 16th century, something you might begin to recognize as an ongoing fair is that a huge amount of trade had to be conducted at fairs in this period. Merchants would travel and bring their goods. It is the most effective way to organize the market. The sixteenth century, of course, places you squarely in the origins of the European Reformation. From 1510 to the 1920s onwards, you are truly at the center of it all. By the 1560s we saw the first publication of a catalog of all the books displayed at the exhibition, 100 years after the innovations in printing had begun in the mid-15th century. This is the origin of the comprehensive and continuous Western bibliography. It is the beginnings of the Amazon book culture, in the mid-16th century in West Germany.

From that period onwards, from the 1660s until the 18th century, Frankfurt became the most prominent book fair in the Western world. However, they face increasing problems, due to various types of censorship and very fierce competition from Leipzig, in the state of Saxony. People who know their own Reformation history will know that Saxony plays an outside role in the history of the Reformation through its patronage of people like Martin Luther. By the 1700s, it had become just a much better place to work and do business. Thus, in the 1760s, the Frankfurt Book Fair ceased operations during the twentieth century. So, if you ask, is there a history of the Frankfurt Book Fair and the Weimar Republic or Nazi Germany? Why haven’t I seen any amazing modernist ads or anything? Because there was nothing, because there was no exhibition.

In the wake of World War II, the Frankfurt Book Fair appeared in the form we know today. This is no coincidence because Frankfurt’s 19th century claim to fame was that in 1848 or 1849, it was home to Germany’s first elected parliament, an elected national parliament, the so-called Frankfurt Parliament which met in St. Paul’s Church in Frankfurt and drafted a constitution that is considered a classic liberal constitution of the 19th century. When West Germany was moving beyond having just one currency, the Deutschmark, from ’48 onwards, and was moving towards a constitution in 1949, the St. Paul’s Constitution was in fact the cornerstone of the German democratic project. It had its influence in Weimar as well, but was most influential at its founding in 1949. And so in the church, a group of newly created West German publishers mounted an exhibition to signify that Germany would become democratic, would connect with the heritage of the nineteenth century, and would do so through free publishing. This is indeed what launched the Frankfurt Book Fair in its modern incarnation.

By the 1950s, it was already a very major player. It internationalizes very fast. Then from the 1960s onwards, the other association people might have with Frankfurt other than sausages is the Frankfurt School, cultural Marxism. Frankfurt is therefore a center for far-left politics in Germany. They are some of the most hardline elements in the Green Party. Joschka Fischer famously exits the Frankfurt scene. And so the Frankfurt Book Fair, which is West German capitalism – insofar as Germany has a financial market, it is in Frankfurt – and West German publishing and global capitalism are smack in the middle of Germany’s closest approximation to the Parisian left bank, essentially.

The Frankfurt Book Fair thus became a very controversial affair, often politicized by radical students and so on. The whole thing, in fact, has come down to the present day, where there have been major scandals around Salman Rushdie and Palestinian authors. All the usual kinds of political-cultural drama you’d expect in Germany took place there.

California: Exactly how big is the global publishing industry, and how does this reflect on Frankfurt’s economic footprint?

in: If you start from publisher revenue, like net licensing sales, like the narrow, tight, legitimate definition of what book publishing and other types of publishing generates, it’s about $76 billion in 2022. And you can break that down into details. $26 billion comes from the American side, that is, a third. Germany generates about $10 billion. Japan: $9.3 billion. India $9 billion. UK $5 billion. I’m not sure, actually, whether the China numbers are there because, as I know from personal experience, publishing in China has a completely different dimension. But this kind of pitch is what we’re talking about. So, if you’re a broke author, it’s oligarch’s money. From a global economic perspective, this is nothing more than a pinprick. You know, one hundred trillion of annual value added, publishing is a relatively small part.

But one way to think about publishing is that it’s the thing on which the entire cultural-industrial complex is balanced, pretty much. Because that’s where the intellectual property is. And if you look at cultural industries across a broader kind of disciplines, we’re talking about significant percentage points of GDP. We’re talking about 3% of global GDP being the creative economy, all the cultural and creative industries combined. Almost all of these have some element of publishing. If you add labor, it’s not a terribly productive sector. So perhaps UNESCO believes that the share of global employment in creative industries is closer to 6% of global employment. This is huge. In the book subsector alone, some estimates suggest that the broader book value chain creates 3.7 million jobs worldwide.

Frankfurt is a big business city, isn’t it? It’s not global big money, nor is it AI, but as the true annual centerpiece, it’s a huge deal. And I remember going as a kid in the 70s, it was just heaven because the books were cheaper than in regular bookstores. Apparently they had to stop people from bringing suitcases to the fair because people were getting run over because hordes of book crazy people would charge to try and get books at deeply discounted prices.

California: Are the traditional gatekeepers of the book industry still in place? Have disruptions caused by technologies like artificial intelligence or platforms like Amazon affected the traditional structure of the book industry?

in: In my part of the publishing world, the whole time I’ve been publishing, it’s been less than I expected, to be completely honest. The basic structure of the deal, as I was just describing, appears to still be largely holding up. I mean, there were moments of self-publishing breakthrough. Fifty shades of grey It was perhaps the first in a series of erotic novels to achieve international bestsellers. Like these are the ones that I think really broke through. I believe this was originally self-published. But it does not appear to have radically changed the paradigm. The big deals you hear about first novels and so on are still with the publishing houses you expect to see. Because in the attention economy, after all, you know, it’s crucially about how you direct people. And the big-name outlets that can secure favorable promotional deals with Amazon still have really big leverage. Audiobooks have changed the game to some extent as people are investing heavily in them.

California: Is English dominant in the publishing industry? Or has China’s presence in Frankfurt increased over time, as a reflection of its growing global power?

in: I mean the way people talk about this is really cool. English is still the “Great Source Centre”. The issuer’s position is somewhat similar to how the dollar works with the global foreign exchange system. The vast majority of translations are done into English or outside of English. So English is the focus, and other language literatures basically revolve around that, right? So there is a very large translation of Korean, Japanese or Spanish texts into English. Traffic between speakers is much more modest. It will be interesting to see how that works. Because the one area where there can be no serious debate about the extraordinary usefulness of AI is translation. And this might start to change that – like the possibility of moving between Korean and Spanish or Chinese and Spanish, which is very confusing and exciting, I think.

China’s role is to be a large buyer and a relatively cautious exporter so far. So they buy and pay well, in my experience, for the rights to English language texts. It simply has an impact on the size of the market there, which is huge. Book culture is a strong and important thing among educated Chinese people. They like to buy books. They have beautiful bookstores all over the country. You have a wonderful and very well selected series of libraries. So I think the bottom line is that English remains dominant as the source language, but Korean, Japanese, Spanish, and to a lesser extent Chinese, are increasing their presence and negotiating power in this market.