Toby Mundy is the managing director and publisher of Atlantic Books. This week he is blogging for First Drafts from the Frankfurt Book Fair, the world's largest book trade event.
This year is my tenth Frankfurt Book Fair. I'm in the same hotel as previous years, and the Frankfurt weather is unseasonably warm. The taxi ride from the airport was particularly unpleasant: my driver this year drove aggressively and at great speed, even by the standards of Frankfurt cabbies. I've taken in recent years to arriving on the Sunday, three days before the start of the fair proper, for preliminary meetings with publishers and literary agents from around the world at one of the city's two grand hotels. These meetings usually last about half an hour, and consist of ten minutes of catching up and gossip, and the rest pitching, or hearing pitches for, forthcoming titles. Before email, lots of deals were done at the fair; now, when new projects can be sent around the world at the push of a button, it's more about relationship building, keeping track of what's happening in the publishing cultures of different countries, and seeding future projects with potential publishers in other countries.
In the last week I concluded deals on a few books that should interest Prospect readers: Robert Kagan's The Return of History, a barnstorming short book I bought from Bob's US publisher Knopf which we'll publish next spring; and two books for which we have the publishing rights: Edward Luttwak's incendiary The Middle of Nowhere, based on his recent Prospectarticle of the same name, which argues that the geopolitical importance of the middle east is much overstated. Given that the issue of US and especially UK disengagement from Iraq is likely to remain live for much of 2008, the timing of this book is good. The other book is by another sometime Prospect contributor, Kenan Malik, who will write a piece of intellectual reportage on the Salman Rushdie fatwa and its reverberations. 2009 sees the 20th anniversary of the fatwa, and over the past two decades its cultural and political significance seems to me to have grown and grown. Kenan came into the office last week to discuss the book and gave a gripping presentation. There's more to this story than anyone thought.
We've also come to the fair to announce the acquisition of an exciting new book about the Clash, in their own words and pictures. It promises lots of hitherto unseen photographs and interviews, and will be our lead non-fiction title for autumn 2008. The Beatles was a giant global bestseller, and while we daren't hope for success on that scale, the Clash have retained their credibility over the years and still have a very big following in the UK and overseas—we're thrilled to have acquired the book. We were only given permission to announce its existence on Friday—our plan is to release news of its acquisition, with suitable fanfare, this Thursday, and to find some excellent publishing partners for it around the world. You heard it here first…
This year is my tenth Frankfurt Book Fair. I'm in the same hotel as previous years, and the Frankfurt weather is unseasonably warm. The taxi ride from the airport was particularly unpleasant: my driver this year drove aggressively and at great speed, even by the standards of Frankfurt cabbies. I've taken in recent years to arriving on the Sunday, three days before the start of the fair proper, for preliminary meetings with publishers and literary agents from around the world at one of the city's two grand hotels. These meetings usually last about half an hour, and consist of ten minutes of catching up and gossip, and the rest pitching, or hearing pitches for, forthcoming titles. Before email, lots of deals were done at the fair; now, when new projects can be sent around the world at the push of a button, it's more about relationship building, keeping track of what's happening in the publishing cultures of different countries, and seeding future projects with potential publishers in other countries.
In the last week I concluded deals on a few books that should interest Prospect readers: Robert Kagan's The Return of History, a barnstorming short book I bought from Bob's US publisher Knopf which we'll publish next spring; and two books for which we have the publishing rights: Edward Luttwak's incendiary The Middle of Nowhere, based on his recent Prospectarticle of the same name, which argues that the geopolitical importance of the middle east is much overstated. Given that the issue of US and especially UK disengagement from Iraq is likely to remain live for much of 2008, the timing of this book is good. The other book is by another sometime Prospect contributor, Kenan Malik, who will write a piece of intellectual reportage on the Salman Rushdie fatwa and its reverberations. 2009 sees the 20th anniversary of the fatwa, and over the past two decades its cultural and political significance seems to me to have grown and grown. Kenan came into the office last week to discuss the book and gave a gripping presentation. There's more to this story than anyone thought.
We've also come to the fair to announce the acquisition of an exciting new book about the Clash, in their own words and pictures. It promises lots of hitherto unseen photographs and interviews, and will be our lead non-fiction title for autumn 2008. The Beatles was a giant global bestseller, and while we daren't hope for success on that scale, the Clash have retained their credibility over the years and still have a very big following in the UK and overseas—we're thrilled to have acquired the book. We were only given permission to announce its existence on Friday—our plan is to release news of its acquisition, with suitable fanfare, this Thursday, and to find some excellent publishing partners for it around the world. You heard it here first…
