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.
The first day of the fair proper, in the gigantic exhibition centre known as the Messe. Eighteen half-hour meetings, followed by a drinks reception followed by a dinner. It has been a long day. But a good one. We formally announced our acquisition of the Clash book, which has caused a flurry of gratifying interest. We need to find good publishing partners from around the world, and quite a few fans of the band in the world's publishing houses made themselves known to us.
We also have two books on the shortlist of the American National Book Awards: Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great, and a brilliant novel called Fieldwork by a clever young American writer called Mischa Berlinski, which Farrar, Strauss and Giroux publish in the US and we'll publish in the UK next year. The National Book Award thing won't directly help our editions of the book, but it should help us get Berlinski's novel reviewed in Britain, which helps push sales along.
I also completed the acquisition of three books: Alpha Dogs by James Harding, the superbly gifted writer on the Times, which describes how a political consultancy called Sawyer Miller helped shape modern media politics, and which we'll publish here next August in time for the US presidential election; a short book called The Spirit of the Enlightenment by the Paris-based philosopher and historian Tzvetan Todorov, which defends Enlightenment values and which has already been a French and Italian bestseller; and a terrific book by Susan Pinker called The Sexual Paradox which explores gender differences in school and the workplace. There was also a short but exciting bidding war for the American publishing rights to our book White King Red Queen, Daniel Johnson's account of how the cold war was fought out on the chessboard (see his Prospect essay on the same subject here), which Houghton Mifflin won.
The first day of the fair proper, in the gigantic exhibition centre known as the Messe. Eighteen half-hour meetings, followed by a drinks reception followed by a dinner. It has been a long day. But a good one. We formally announced our acquisition of the Clash book, which has caused a flurry of gratifying interest. We need to find good publishing partners from around the world, and quite a few fans of the band in the world's publishing houses made themselves known to us.
We also have two books on the shortlist of the American National Book Awards: Christopher Hitchens's God is Not Great, and a brilliant novel called Fieldwork by a clever young American writer called Mischa Berlinski, which Farrar, Strauss and Giroux publish in the US and we'll publish in the UK next year. The National Book Award thing won't directly help our editions of the book, but it should help us get Berlinski's novel reviewed in Britain, which helps push sales along.
I also completed the acquisition of three books: Alpha Dogs by James Harding, the superbly gifted writer on the Times, which describes how a political consultancy called Sawyer Miller helped shape modern media politics, and which we'll publish here next August in time for the US presidential election; a short book called The Spirit of the Enlightenment by the Paris-based philosopher and historian Tzvetan Todorov, which defends Enlightenment values and which has already been a French and Italian bestseller; and a terrific book by Susan Pinker called The Sexual Paradox which explores gender differences in school and the workplace. There was also a short but exciting bidding war for the American publishing rights to our book White King Red Queen, Daniel Johnson's account of how the cold war was fought out on the chessboard (see his Prospect essay on the same subject here), which Houghton Mifflin won.
