Gabrielle, manager and buyer at McLeods booksellers in Rotorua, received a RISE Bookselling scholarship to attend Frankfurt Book Fair in 2024. Here, she discusses her time at the book fair:
A year has passed since I attended Frankfurter Buchmesse, the Frankfurt Book Fair. The gift of time has allowed my thoughts to percolate, and come together, after being in a jumbled mess thanks to the scale of what I saw. The Frankfurt Book Fair is known as the world’s biggest gathering of all things books. For many years it had loomed large in my mind, a mythical place for book lovers. So, when I received the RISE Bookselling scholarship to attend in 2024, I felt extremely grateful.
Nothing can prepare you for the scale of Buchmesse. Spread across four huge pavilions, each three stories in height, three days is just enough time to skim the surface and to sample a little bit of everything.
I was one of three scholarship recipients, my fellow booksellers were from Sydney, Australia and Timișoara, Romania. Meeting these two women was definitely a highlight of the trip. I really relished the opportunity to learn more about what bookselling looks like in each of their countries. It was also comforting to hear that we face many of the same challenges but ultimately feel hopeful about where bookselling is heading. The three of us navigated the fair together, attending events that were timetabled for us, and finding time to browse stands that took our interest. The festival hums with such an amazing energy, there are people from all corners of the globe. In attendance are the huge international publishers you expect to see such as Penguin, Bonnier and Hachette, but there are also tiny imprints from places you might least expect. I saw so many stunning books; beautiful children’s books from France; Manga from small Japanese imprints; illustrators from Catalonia; Hungarian popular fiction. My mind was swimming with book covers and ideas. It was so encouraging to see books in their masses being discussed and admired.
Dotted around the pavilions are event spaces where every hour presentations of all kinds are happening. Predominately the language of the festival is German, but there were a lot of English language events too. I attended some very thought-provoking discussions. One event that has stayed in my mind was hosted by the government of Ukraine and featured librarians and literacy specialists. The discussion centred around what happens when children are displaced from their home country due to a war and how this affects literacy rates. Also, how a society functions when libraries are destroyed. There were displays of damaged books from bomb blasts, as many libraries in the Ukraine have been destroyed. The event was very moving and sobering. It was inspiring to hear the initiatives set up to help Ukrainian children, rehomed to new countries, read and learn their language.
We were also invited to a dinner hosted by the European and International Booksellers Federation. I was lucky enough to sit next to delegates from the Italian, French and Netherlands bookselling associations respectively. This was when I had the most interesting conversations. We discussed the state of bookselling in our countries; we discussed the larger world of books and publishing. After a few hours two things became apparent. We were all deeply worried about declining literacy standards, that people – children especially – are not reading as much as they were. This has impacted book sales, but it is a much bigger conversation about longevity for bookshops. Secondly, our fellow European booksellers were worried about censorship, about ideologies from the past rearing their ugly head, and right-leaning governments gaining too much power. This was something I wasn’t expecting about Buchmesse, strong political overtones everywhere – politics and books cannot be separated. The tone was set right from the opening ceremony. The then German Commissioner for Culture and the Media, Claudia Roth, spoke about the ugly past Germany is still trying to escape, the metaphorical ash from book burnings still hangs in the air. She spoke of how important books are for a fair and open society, that governments should not control or sway what is read, and by who. She encouraged booksellers, publishers and authors to keep up, in her opinion, the most important work of our time. Spreading the written word and encouraging a future generation to read and be curious. Because a society that cannot read cannot interpret information or make critical judgements and is therefore prone to corruption and misinformation.
I left Buchmesse on a high, knowing I was in the right field, that books are a future that needs people like me, who care, and have passion. If you are considering applying for a RISE scholarship, I cannot recommend it enough.