The Frankfurt Book Fair
Tomorrow the 2014 Frankfurt Book Fair opens its doors to publishing folk from around the world. For five days publishers, agents, booksellers, librarians, film producers, rights managers, publishing technology specialists, and an occasional wild-eyed author will celebrate the High Holy Days of the international publishing world. Deals will be made. Buzz will be generated. Subsidiary rights will be sold. And the written word will be celebrated in all its guises, because no one works in publishing who doesn't love books.
In the midst of all the focus on new books and new media, I hope one or two pause to remember that Frankfurt was one of Europe's most important book markets in the days when moveable type was a hot new technology and people went to book fairs to buy actual books.
In some ways, Frankfurt was an unlikely place for a major book fair to thrive. The city had no university and was not one of the major printing centers. It had one thing going for it that was more important than either scholars or printers: location, location, location. Positioned on major trade routes, at the junction of the River Main and the Rhine, Frankfurt was almost equidistant from Lübeck, Venice, Vienna, Lyon, Paris, Antwerp, and Amsterdam.* By the thirteenth century, Frankfurt am Main was home to a thriving trade fair, held twice a year in the spring and the fall. By 1574, one visitor, Henri Estienne II described it as "the sum of all the fairs of the whole world." Merchants sold cloth from Augsburg, metal goods from Nuremberg, Rhenish wine and Westphalian hams, dried fish, hops and furs from the north, glass from Bohemia, silver and pewter from Saxony. Horses, weapons, pottery, and spices. Not to mention books.
Manuscripts were bought and sold at the Frankfurt fairs as early as the fourteenth century. Printed books found their way to Frankfurt by 1462**; by 1488, printers and publishers accounted for one-twelfth of the stalls at the fair. The fair quickly became a magnet for the book trade, drawing not only printers, but booksellers, paper merchants, type founders, and bookbinders from all over Europe. Scholars came in search of new or rare books. Authors came to meet printers***--and each other. At its height, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Frankfurt was central to the distribution of books across Europe.
In the eighteenth century, the Frankfurt book fair faded, due to pressures from Catholic censorship, the Thirty Years' War, and competition from Leipzig. By 1764, the old Frankfurt book fair was effectively dead. The modern Frankfurt Book Fair was born almost 200 years later in 1949. Since then, the fair has grown from 205 exhibitors to thousands of exhibitors and hundreds of thousands of visitors.
* As anyone who's gotten carried away at a used book store knows, books are heavy. Water transport made it easier to ship books to the annual fair.
**Just to give you some context: Gutenberg printed his first bible in 1455.
***Some things don't change.
(This post is brought to you with thanks to Alison Taylor-Brown, who first brought the link between the old and new book fairs to my attention.)
On The Trail of Genghis Khan
I've admitted before that I have a soft spot in my heart for Genghis Khan. My Own True Love and I dearly love a road trip, especially if it includes a historical site or three.
How could I resist On The Trail of Genghis Khan--the story of a Road Trip Through History on the grand scale?
In On The Trail of Genghis Khan: An Epic Journey Through the Land of the Nomads Australian adventurer Tim Cope tells the story of his trek on horseback from Mongolia to Hungary: a 6,000-mile journey across the Eurasian steppes.
Cope’s plan was to follow the westward expansion of the Mongols, who created the largest land empire in history under the leadership of Genghis Khan. He hoped not only to understand the lives of the Mongols and the nomadic peoples who preceded them, but to look for living traces of nomadic heritage. He expected the trip to take eighteen months; instead it took more than three years.
The narrative alternates between epic scope and day-to-day bumbling. With limited facility with the Mongolian language and even less horsemanship, Cope seems to be ironically named in the beginning chapters. His horses were stolen six days into his trek. He struggled with his gear, ran low on food, made dangerous choices, and was regularly saved by the kindness of strangers.
Cope’s experiences would be interesting enough in themselves, but he gives his story a bigger context by interweaving it with both the history of Genghis Khan’s armed horsemen and accounts of their modern descendants. Modern Mongolian nomads who live in traditional felt tents with televisions powered by car batteries. Cattle herders struggling to survive in post-soviet Kazakhstan. Hungarian horsemen who have romanticized their nomadic past.
On The Trail of Genghis Khan will appeal to anyone interested in adventure or nomads—past or present.
This review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
Whiskey Women
Fred Minnick is an award-winning, ascot-wearing, journalist and photographer. His newest book, Whiskey Women, combines two of my favorite things--history and whiskey.* I'm thrilled that he's agreed to answer a few questions about the book, and whiskey, here on History in the Margins.
Pour yourself a dram, pull up a seat, and enjoy!
You came to Whiskey Women as a journalist, not a historian. How did you make the leap to writing about the past?
I’m fascinated with history, and whiskey essentially equals history. Early Americans used it for medicinal purposes and currency. You can’t professionally write about whiskey without covering history at some point. Whiskey helped found this country. George Washington was a distiller; and the Whiskey Rebellion was the first time the federal army took arms against citizens.
You cover a lot of historical ground in Whiskey Women, from Mesopotamian beer brewers to Prohibition bootleggers to women distillery owners. Was there one story that initially caught your imagination?
There were so many. But I found six so-called Queen of the Bootleggers. Every time a woman was apprehended for bootlegging during Prohibition, the press gave her a moniker. If she had a large amount of booze, they seem to always call her Queen of the Bootleggers. But there was really only one—Gertrude Cleo Lythgoe. She ran a multimillion-dollar bootlegging operation and supplied the United States with premium Scotch and rye whiskey. She was so famous that men wrote to newspapers asking Cleo to marry them.
The phrase "whiskey women" calls to mind tough broads. Did you find that the stereotype held true?
I certainly discovered quite a few pistol-packing women, but most women making legitimate or illicit whiskey were just trying to provide for their families after a husband died.
The importance of women in the whiskey business seems to hold true across time and geographical boundaries. Are there traditional social factors that link women to whiskey?
Yes. Poor women were often forced into distilling. During the Irish famine, when arrested, one woman said illegal whiskey was the only way she could provide for her family. The same story was told to judges during America’s Prohibition. It was such an issue that President William McKinley and governors frequently pardoned single mothers from moonshining and bootlegging sentences. Judges were also more lenient to single mothers.
How will whiskey brands react to your book?
I’ve had several people tell me it will change the industry or at least how they market to women. After Prohibition, distillers made a pact not to market to women. They lifted this nearly 30 years ago, but are only now marketing to women and are doing so by creating lighter whiskies or flavoring them. In my book, I dispel the myth that women don’t like whiskey. In fact, they’ve been drinking and making whiskey since the beginning.
Finally, for those of us who like whiskey as well as history, is there a particular tipple you'd recommend that we sip while we read Whiskey Women?
I hope more people ask me this question, because I’m extremely excited about my findings in researching Bushmills, Laphroaig and Maker’s Mark. Women shaped these three brands and really changed their respective categories.
For more information on Fred and Whiskey Women,visit his website: www.fredminnick.com
* Or whisky, depending on where your bottle hails from. Personally, I'm picky but not parochial.