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The second day ended with a wursty surprise: Bernd had to catch his plane, so he confronted me with his order, a plate with five types of sausages, sauerkraut and fried potatoes! I needed some time and a lot of mustard and beer to get through this, but my friend Jan helped me. We sat outside of the restaurant surrounded by Asian and US tourists at the “Römer“, the famous historical building in Frankfurt where the German soccer team used to be celebrated on the balcony after big championships.

We all started our final day at the fair with a little cold we hat caught the day before, but we fought bravely against it with a lot of free christmassy tea from the Yogi-Tee booth at the other side of the hall. We had a lot of visitors this day, professional art directors and editors, photographers, cartoon and comic artists and curious people who got interested, because we didn’t show photographs like all the other image agencies around us.
The signing session was not really well attended, mostly due to the fact that we didn’t do much advertisement for it on the fair. It didn’t show up in the catalogue and schedules around the fair – we signed to the fair very late, after the deadlines of all the catalogues, flyers and press material that was printed for the fair. However, many of the little signing sessions and public readings of unknown and popular authors among the fair weren’t popular either. The visitors flocked to the stands as soon as they heard the popping of opened sparkling wine bottles.

In the end of the 3rd and final day at the fair, Nils, Frank and I were exhausted, but content and happy. Personally, I enjoyed it. I have been on several fairs in my life like the automobile fair IAA and the consumer electronics fair IFA, both in Berlin, but the Frankfurt Book Fair was different. It was not about some shiny happy-making flatscreens and video games, not about fast or fancy little cars. this fair presented art, true art.
Of course, there was a lot of business going round there, people in black suits and suitcases making deals and contracts on one side and silly crime and love novels on the other side. But I had a feeling that all those people on the fair shared a true love or at least interest in art, in fantasy or in knowledge. I have to admit that I do not really like Frankfurt (though I just have been there for two times, I’m eager to get convinced of the opposite, dear Frankfurters!) and the way motorists are treated, but the atmosphere was mainly charming.

Nils and I returned to Jan in Ladenburg (where we lived during the Fair) for the last time. We rushed through the county this evening with joy, visited a ska concert (Skall & Crossbone) in a youth club in Mannheim and the 25th anniversary party of the famous drum & bass club “Connection”.
The next day, the three of us and Jan’s housemate drove to the beautiful city of Heidelberg, where we climbed the approx. 300 steps of the stairs to the castle. You have a great vista up there on the valley of Heidelberg and the famous bridge, where, according to a legend, the former federal chancellor of Germany, Helmut Kohl, used to sit on in his student’s ages, eating apple puree. Some tourists from Russia and Japan asked me to make a snapshot of them with their cameras.
In the evening hours, Nils and I got on our 600 kilometers way back to Berlin. We had some great company – the radio stations of Hessia, Thuringia and Brandenburg played some great German folk music and nice Techno sets from the local discos while we flew over the dark autobahn.

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Tags: Event, Events, Exhibition, Frankfurt, Frankfurt Book Fair 2009, frankfurter buchmesse

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 6:16 pm and is filed under Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.