Welcome to the London Book Fair, where everyone knows their place
Everybody knows that the publishing industry is a rigorously stratified world, characterized by a reverence for hierarchy and a near-fanatical observance of ritual. Or maybe we suspect as much — but for those who would like to have those beliefs starkly confirmed, I would recommend a visit to the London Book Fair, which took place in the city’s Kensington district last week.
The fair, which this year had over 1,000 exhibitors and something like 30,000 visitors, is one of the biggest events of the international publishing calendar. For three days, agents, editors, publishers, scouts and many other people whose jobs are harder to explain gather in a frenzied fashion, primarily to sell and buy foreign rights for English-language books, but also to take temperatures, observe prevailing winds and scheme.
For those who weren’t there to close deals, the fair offered the opportunity to map out the minutely graded power structure of the publishing industry.
Just inside the doors of the cavernous Olympia exhibition space, the Penguin Random House stand was on the right, its entrance staffed by a row of tightly smiling assistants. The HarperCollins stand was on the left, with assistants gently standing guard over the editors inside, who were taking one meeting after another at little white tables, standing up every half an hour to greet another delegation of international publishers, smiles unflagging, notebooks poised.
Beyond that was Simon and Schuster, and a pavilion with all the French publishing houses collected together, then Macmillan to the left, across the aisle from the German pavilion, which faced Hachette. Everything radiated outward from this central core across two carpeted floors, in diminishing order of importance: the slightly smaller publishing houses, then the ones whose best years are behind them, then the niche ones, then the flatly obscure. The positioning of the national pavilions followed the same brutal logic.
The ghostwriting firms were on the second floor; the logistics firms were on the first. Literary Translation Center: second floor, but in a good position. Academic publishers: first floor, but out of the way. Distribution and print management: first floor, right near the stretch of corridor where people tended to abandon their umbrellas. Some small publishing houses had forgone a stand, and their editors were conducting meetings while sitting on the floor, or leaning against siding with signs imploring “Do Not Lean on Me, Please!”
Eva Ferri, the publishing director of the Italian house Edizioni E/O and its British offshoot Europa Editions (and one of the few people who knows who Elena Ferrante is, although she wasn’t telling), said, “I publish books from all over the world not because I think I’m going to get rich, but because I think it’s an important and beautiful thing. It’s the only thing that gives you the energy to be in a space like this, with people literally walking on you — on top of you.” Her publishing house didn’t have a stand this year, and she laughed as she described trying to compete with bigger, richer players: “My strategy is to inspire pity. You know, like a stray dog.”
At the very back of the hall on the first floor, patrolled by zealous security guards and visually demarcated by its own special color of carpet (lurid purple as opposed to the more industrial blues and greens), there was the International Rights Section, where the deals are hammered out. Against this profoundly purple backdrop — I really cannot emphasize this enough: I have never seen a carpet that color before — agents pitched books to foreign publishers, making their authors’ cases with unfeigned enthusiasm.
Walking between the rows of tables, I noticed that it no longer seems to be enough for an agent to say that they love a book. They must be in love with it. They must look into the eyes of the Spanish publisher they are pitching, and they must say that they are “so, so, so in love with this book.” They have to mean it.
On the first day of the fair, the chatter in the rights center was about an eight-way auction for Missouri Williams’ “The Vivisectors,” which had been closed in front of a Caravaggio during the HarperCollins party at the National Gallery the night before. The significant presence of American film and TV executives added a glossy sheen, as did the constant discussion of who had been invited to which party, and who had stayed out latest.
Heady as they were, these moments of high glamour were counterbalanced by the frankly poignant spectacle of hundreds of people in business-wear sitting on the floor, tapping away on their phones, whispering urgently to one another and eating chicken Caesar wraps. On the first day of the fair, I spotted a well-dressed woman fully asleep on the floor, her blow-dried blonde hair spilling over the handbag she was using as a pillow. It was 3 p.m., but it looked like an airport in the middle of the night, or some kind of conference center Fyre Festival.
As an indicator of who mattered, or how much money they had, the floor plan was an excellent guide. As an indicator of why many thousands of people from all over the world had gathered in this strange space, with its terrible food and its weird acoustics, to conduct conversations that could plausibly have taken place over email, the floor plan was of no use.
What were they all doing? What were they all talking about, in meeting after meeting, sitting down and standing up and hugging each other as they cried “So good to see you!” in the air near each other’s ears?
The publishing industry may be enamored of hierarchy and ritual, but it is possibly even more enamored of gossip, of chatting and hanging out, and it seemed that this was what everyone had come to the London Book Fair to do.
Alex Bowler, the publisher at Faber, said, “I first started coming here in 2004 as an assistant, and I didn’t know what I was supposed to be doing. No one told me. It took me a few years to realize that you’re just here to talk to people.” Asked to elaborate, he rolled his eyes amiably. “Triangulating,” he said. “Gathering intelligence.”
Coming together seemed to be almost an end in itself, whether the meeting took place at a wobbly white table in Kensington, or at the Canongate party, held this year in a tropical-themed pub.
“We’re all just here to see our friends, really,” said a young literary agent who asked not to be named, because she had just given the game away. Simon Prosser, the publisher at Hamish Hamilton, put it in terms that bordered on the life affirming. “The fact that we’re all together in this way convinces me that what we do has a meaning,” he said. “Why else would we do it?”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
