Buchmesse

Carole Cadwalladr
The Observer, Sunday October 14 2007

"It's some comfort to discover, at the end of my first long, spirit-sapping day at the Frankfurt Book Fair, that I'm not the first Observer journalist who's come and suffered here. A librarian from the newspaper digs up an old microfiche film and there, in grainy black and white, is a copy of The Observer from 1981, with a report on the fair by a certain Martin Amis.
It was a long time ago. Back then, he writes, the biggest book fair in the world had an unimaginable allure, it was seen as a week-long jamboree where 'publishers gorge themselves on expensive food and drink and have the kind of sexual encounters with one another that used to be characterised in novels by phrases like: 'towards morning he took her again.'"


Ich bin schockiert. Zu einer solchen Veranstaltung fahre ich nicht. Hätte ich das früher gewusst, dann wäre ich bisher auch mit ganz anderen Erwar nie hingefahren. Aber ich werde mich schon mal mental auf nächstes Jahr vorbereiten.