TITLE: Discovering a Peculiar Species of "Book Person"
AUTHOR: Peter Weidhaas
First Frankfurt: 1966


The year was 1966. In Copenhagen I climbed into my old VW Beetle and traveled to the Danish–German border near Flensburg, still relaxed and calm. From there I moved south on the German highways with the aggressiveness that prevails on those roads, and I became increasingly tense. I can still picture myself taking the western exit from the freeway and rolling on toward Frankfurt, which even then was a Mecca for “book people.” On the way I had picked up a hitchhiker who was striving toward the same goal. It took us many agonizing minutes to find a parking space, and to find our way to the fair. We both approached the big hall shyly and curiously. Inside throngs of publishers and book dealers circled among the stands loaded with thousands of books that met their many interests. This was an active and multi-layered community, one whose members varied significantly by skin color, sex, clothing and disposition, but which somehow managed to cohere as a group, and even speak a common tongue—though the languages one heard were mostly incomprehensible. Something bound these people together, they who from the outside looked so different and acted so differently from “normal” human beings.

What I experienced here was a community of individualists, who wrote books, produced books, sold books, read books—books of fantasy, books of science, books for study, for use, for enjoyment, useful books, useless books, picture books, children’s books, photo books—books for reflection, books for enjoyment, provocative books, political books—and ugly ones too, stupid ones, seductive ones, and even repulsive ones (though one didn’t know where to draw the boundaries, and these books were accepted and defended on the principle of freedom of expression). It was my discovery of this species of “book person” that made my first visit to the Frankfurt Book Fair so noteworthy.

With regard to my quest, I got lucky at this Fair very quickly. I found what was for my qualifications a well-paid job as a production manager at the scientific and medical specialty publishing house of Georg Thieme in Stuttgart. After I completed my move from Copenhagen to Stuttgart, I soon began my new job there.

I took a second decisive step in the summer of 1968, when I joined the organizational team of the Frankfurt Book Fair, and from then on for seven years I managed exhibitions of German books around the world. I tried to understand the cultures in which I wanted to introduce German knowledge, and fast became interested in their literature as well. I learned how to be a representative and how to cut a good figure in front of ambassadors, ministers and government officials. I acquired the ability to deal with and to communicate with great authors, politicians and intellectuals.

It was the most comprehensive training for the posts of a director of the Frankfurt Book Fair imaginable, although naturally that was not the intended goal of my activity while presenting German editions abroad. Nobody imagined, and certainly not I, where this career would lead.

But then came that day in the summer of 1973. To the astonishment of all the people who had followed the discussion regarding the successor to Sigfred Taubert, then current director of the Book Fair, I, the youngest among the applicants, was chosen to lead and to develop the Frankfurt Book Fair, a task which would be mine for the next quarter century.

[You can read the rest of this story in Peter Weidhaas's SEE YOU IN FRANKFURT!]