Frankfurt Book Fair Day 1

I met Charlotte T at 11:30 and we walked in together. She wanted to show a couple of publishers her mother's poetry, and though I told her Frankfurt is a rights fair and editors usually don't come, apparently she was able to drum up a bit of interest. I went straight to my favorite hall - 8.0 where all the publishers from the US and UK are.

My first mission was to find ARC (Advanced Reader Copies - proofs of books yet to be published). Last year I got around 10, mostly thrillers, but this year I only got four: Sara Paretsky's new standalone "Bleeding Kansas" to be released in Jan 2008, "The Almost Moon" by Lovely Bones author Alice Sebold (comes out in a few days), "Devil's Peak" by Deon Meyer to be released in March 2008, and a debut novel by 25 yr old Texan Stefan Merrill Block called "The story of forgetting" set for April 2008.

I also collected a few children's book catalogues until I could carry no more, walked around and visited some friendly faces from last year and chatted a while with a couple of reps from Lonely Planet about the Burma situation (LP publishes one of the only travel guides to Burma and are under pressure to pull it to discourage travel there. While I agree that package tours are irresponsible, I think it is essential that independent travellers keep making the trek) and our trip to Zimbabwe earlier this year.

At 3 pm, I met Tracy at the entrance and we went to the Comics section in Hall 3.0 because one of Daniel's favorite illustrators, Ralf Koenig, was signing books there. We waited in line a good half hour before meeting him. He drew a genie for Daniel which Tracy thought looked like her brother-in-law Murray Happer (type his name into wikipedia for a picture) so she got him to draw her one too on a page she ripped off of one of my catalogues.

Then we went to Hall 5.0 because she wanted to look at some Slovakian books for a friend. By this time, my feet and back were about to give out, so I went home.

Guy, my friend Synne's husband, had some meetings at the book fair and since he lives in London, we invited him to stay in our new guest room. So he came around 7 pm and we went out to dinner at our favorite Sushi place. I'm afraid we stayed up a bit too late because we were having so much fun - so I'm exhausted for Day 2... stay tuned.

Daniel and Guy