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The Frankfurt Book Fair (German: Frankfurter Buchmesse, FBM) is the world's largest
trade fair A trade fair, also known as trade show, trade exhibition, or trade exposition, is an exhibition organized so that companies in a specific industry can showcase and demonstrate their latest products and services, meet with industry partners and ...
for books, based on the number of publishing companies represented. It is considered to be the most important book fair in the world for international deals and trading. The five-day annual event in mid-October is held at the Frankfurt Trade Fair grounds in
Frankfurt am Main Frankfurt, officially Frankfurt am Main (; Hessian dialects, Hessian: , "Franks, Frank ford (crossing), ford on the Main (river), Main"), is the most populous city in the States of Germany, German state of Hesse. Its 791,000 inhabitants as o ...
,
Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG),, is a country in Central Europe. It is the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany lies between the Baltic and North Sea to the north and the Alps to the sou ...
. The first three days are restricted exclusively to professional visitors; the general public attend the fair on the weekend. Several thousand exhibitors representing book publishing, multimedia and technology companies, as well as content providers from all over the world gather in order to negotiate international publishing rights and license fees. The fair is organised by Frankfurter Buchmesse GmbH, a subsidiary of the ''German Publishers and Booksellers Association''. More than 7,300 exhibitors from over 100 countries and more than 286,000 visitors took part in the year 2017.


History

The Frankfurter Buchmesse, or Frankfurt Book Fair, has a tradition spanning more than 500 years. Before the advent of printed books, the general trade fair in Frankfurt was the place for selling handwritten books, as early as the 12th century.Weidhaas, Peter (2007). ''A History of the Frankfurt Book Fair''. Translated and edited by Carolyn Gossage and W A. Wright. Toronto, Ontario: Dundurn Press. pp. 11, 23–24. . A printers' and publishers' fair became established sometime in the decades after
Johannes Gutenberg Johannes Gensfleisch zur Laden zum Gutenberg (; – 3 February 1468) was a German inventor and craftsman who introduced letterpress printing to Europe with his movable-type printing press. Though not the first of its kind, earlier designs ...
developed
printing Printing is a process for mass reproducing text and images using a master form or template. The earliest non-paper products involving printing include cylinder seals and objects such as the Cyrus Cylinder and the Cylinders of Nabonidus. The ...
in movable letters in
Mainz Mainz () is the capital and largest city of Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. Mainz is on the left bank of the Rhine, opposite to the place that the Main joins the Rhine. Downstream of the confluence, the Rhine flows to the north-west, with Ma ...
near Frankfurt; although no official founding date of the Frankfurt Book Fair is documented, it had definitely been established by 1462, the year that the printers Johann Fust and
Peter Schöffer Peter Schöffer or Petrus Schoeffer (c. 1425 – c. 1503) was an early German printer, who studied in Paris and worked as a manuscript copyist in 1451 before apprenticing with Johannes Gutenberg and joining Johann Fust, a goldsmith, lawyer, and ...
, who had taken over Gutenberg's printing operations after a legal dispute, moved their operations to Frankfurt. The fair became the primary point for book marketing, but also a hub for the diffusion of written texts. During the
Reformation The Reformation (alternatively named the Protestant Reformation or the European Reformation) was a major movement within Western Christianity in 16th-century Europe that posed a religious and political challenge to the Catholic Church and i ...
, the fair was attended by merchants testing the market for new books and by scholars looking for newly available scholarship. Until the end of the 17th century, the Frankfurter Buchmesse was the most important book fair in Europe. It was eclipsed in 1632 by the
Leipzig Book Fair The Leipzig Book Fair (german: Leipziger Buchmesse) is the second largest book fair in Germany after the Frankfurt Book Fair. The fair takes place annually over four days at the Leipzig Trade Fairground in the northern part of Leipzig, Saxony. ...
during the
Enlightenment Enlightenment or enlighten may refer to: Age of Enlightenment * Age of Enlightenment, period in Western intellectual history from the late 17th to late 18th century, centered in France but also encompassing (alphabetically by country or culture): ...
as a consequence of political and cultural developments. After World War II, the first book fair was held again in 1949 at the St. Paul's Church. Since then, it has regained its preeminent position.


Significance

The Frankfurter Buchmesse is the world's largest
trade fair A trade fair, also known as trade show, trade exhibition, or trade exposition, is an exhibition organized so that companies in a specific industry can showcase and demonstrate their latest products and services, meet with industry partners and ...
for books, based both on the number of publishing companies represented, and the number of visitors. It is considered to be the most important book fair in the world for international deals and trading. It is a critical marketing event for launching books and to facilitate the negotiation of the international sale of rights and licences. Book publishing-, multimedia- and technology companies, as well as content providers from all over the world gather. Publishers, agents, booksellers,
librarians A librarian is a person who works professionally in a library providing access to information, and sometimes social or technical programming, or instruction on information literacy to users. The role of the librarian has changed much over time ...
, academics, illustrators, service providers,
film producer A film producer is a person who oversees film production. Either employed by a production company or working independently, producers plan and coordinate various aspects of film production, such as selecting the script, coordinating writing, di ...
s,
translators Translation is the communication of the Meaning (linguistic), meaning of a #Source and target languages, source-language text by means of an Dynamic and formal equivalence, equivalent #Source and target languages, target-language text. The ...
,
professional A professional is a member of a profession or any person who works in a specified professional activity. The term also describes the standards of education and training that prepare members of the profession with the particular knowledge and ski ...
and trade associations, institutions, artists, authors, antiquarians,
software Software is a set of computer programs and associated software documentation, documentation and data (computing), data. This is in contrast to Computer hardware, hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. ...
and
multimedia Multimedia is a form of communication that uses a combination of different content forms such as text, audio, images, animations, or video into a single interactive presentation, in contrast to tradi ...
suppliers all participate in the events. Visitors take the opportunity to obtain information about the publishing market, to network, and to do business.


Organisation

The fair is organised by Frankfurter Buchmesse GmbH, a subsidiary of the ''German Publishers and Booksellers Association''. The five-day annual event in mid-October is held at the Frankfurt Trade Fair grounds in
Frankfurt am Main Frankfurt, officially Frankfurt am Main (; Hessian dialects, Hessian: , "Franks, Frank ford (crossing), ford on the Main (river), Main"), is the most populous city in the States of Germany, German state of Hesse. Its 791,000 inhabitants as o ...
,
Germany Germany, officially the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG),, is a country in Central Europe. It is the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany lies between the Baltic and North Sea to the north and the Alps to the sou ...
. The first three days are restricted exclusively to trade visitors; the general public can attend on the weekend, for a fee. In 2009, 7,314 exhibitors from some 100 countries presented over 400,000 books. Some 300,000 visitors attended the fair. In 2016, more than 10,000
journalist A journalist is an individual that collects/gathers information in form of text, audio, or pictures, processes them into a news-worthy form, and disseminates it to the public. The act or process mainly done by the journalist is called journalism ...
s from 75 countries reported on the fair, which brought together 7,135 exhibitors from 106 countries, and more than 172,296 trade visitors.


Events and joint ventures

The Peace Prize of the German Book Trade has been awarded at the fair each year since 1950 during a ceremony in the Frankfurter Paulskirche. The fair awards the Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year, humoring the book with the oddest title. Certain initiatives would not exist without the Frankfurter Buchmesse and are closely linked to its goals and, up to a point, management structure. On the occasion of the 1980 Fair, Litprom was founded – the Society for the Promotion of African, Asian and Latin American Literature. As a non profit association, it monitors literary trends and selects the best examples of creative writing from Africa, Asia and Latin America for translation into German. It promotes them in Germany, Switzerland and Austria by encouraging contacts between authors and publishers from the
Third World The term "Third World" arose during the Cold War to define countries that remained non-aligned with either NATO The North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO, ; french: Organisation du traité de l'Atlantique nord, ), also called the Nor ...
and those in German-speaking countries. It serves as an information hub and clearing house about literature from Africa, Asia and Latin America, establishing a forum of debate about "Third World" literature. In 2006, Litcam, a campaign against illiteracy was founded. In this context, the 2007 Frankfurt Book Fair also started a
short story A short story is a piece of prose fiction that typically can be read in one sitting and focuses on a self-contained incident or series of linked incidents, with the intent of evoking a single effect or mood. The short story is one of the oldest t ...
project named "Who's on the line? Call for free" by and for people with migration background.


Guest of honour, focus of interest

Since 1976, a ''guest of honour'', or a focus of interest is named for the fair. A special literary programme is organised for the occasion (readings, arts exhibitions, public discussion panels, theatre productions, and radio and TV programmes). A special exhibition hall is set up for the guest country, and the major publishing houses are present at the fair. Canada's presentation as 2020 guest of honour was postponed to 2021 due to the
COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic, also known as the coronavirus pandemic, is an ongoing global pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The novel virus was first identified ...
.


Controversy

The 2007 fair attracted criticism from both the Spanish and German media. German news magazine '' Der Spiegel'' described it as "closed-minded" for its policy of not including the many Catalans who write in Spanish in its definition of Catalan literature. The decision to exclude any element of "Spanishness", defined as literature exclusively done in Spanish, from the fair was made in spite of the fact that the Spanish government contributed more than 6 million euros towards the cost of the fair.


See also

* Peace Prize of the German Book Trade *
German Book Prize The German Book Prize (''Deutscher Buchpreis'') is awarded annually, in October, by the German Publishers and Booksellers Association (''Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels'') to the best new German language novel of the year. The books, publi ...
*
Books in Germany As of 2018, ten firms in Germany rank among the world's biggest publishers of books in terms of revenue: C.H. Beck, Bertelsmann, , , Holtzbrinck Publishing Group, , Springer Nature, Thieme, , and Westermann Druck- und Verlagsgruppe. Overall ...


References


External links

* {{Coord, 50, 06, 41, N, 8, 38, 54, E, type:landmark_source:dewiki, display=title Culture in Frankfurt Trade fairs in Germany Book fairs in Germany Tourist attractions in Frankfurt