The Frankfurt Book Fair is over, at least for this year. While I toured through Germany last week, readers asked me, “Shouldn’t you be at the fair?”
Well, a publisher once explained to me why authors should avoid Frankfurt. He said, “You don’t take a lamb to the slaughterhouse, unless you want to slaughter it.”
I would say that the Frankfurt Book Fair is a bad excuse for eating all kinds of sausage, picking up men, women and everything in between, and drinking too much champagne at parties to which you were not invited.
At the end of the fair, it is impossible to make a distinction between a hot book and a hot sausage.
But I have to admit that I was very impressed with Frankfurt when I was 19. In 1990, I traveled to Frankfurt to see the fair. A few weeks beforehand, I had been fired from the company where I made photocopies all day long.
At the stand of Eichborn Publishing House, I spotted a rather attractive woman who asked me, after my presence at the stand became suspicious, “Do you work for a publishing house?”
“I am a publisher,” I said.
A lie should not stay a lie for too long.
A few weeks later, I started my own publishing house, Kasimir. I published five books, mainly German books in Dutch translation, among them one by Manès Sperber.
After eighteen months, I went bankrupt.
All those bizarre things we do for sex or for love, even starting a publishing house.... And we do realize that the titillating world of naked bodies is a rather disappointing affair.
Abstinence is not the solution for fighting AIDS. But when it comes to fighting melancholy, it helps.