The Frankfurt Book Fair is where deals are done and books are born - on every subject you could imagine, writes Arminta Wallace.
Imagine a shopping centre three times the size of Dundrum, filled with stand after stand of books, spread out over eight separate halls on three levels, and you get some idea of the physical scale of the world's largest publishing rights fair. To be invited into the midst of the Frankfurt Book Fair is, for a book-loving journalist, to arrive in what looks at first sight like book heaven. There are books to the left of you and books to the right. There are small books, big books, children's books; books in every possible language from Korean to Lithuanian. Instantly recognisable names, both of publishers and authors, nestle alongside those you've never seen before - Algora Publishing: Non-Fiction for the Nonplussed - and those, such as the American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons, that you never suspected had anything much to do with books.
But after a stroll around the giant hangar which houses the English-language publishers at Frankfurt and is the home of this year's Irish contingent, it becomes apparent that for a book-loving journalist, a stint at an international book fair is actually something much closer to book hell.
This is because you quickly realise two things. First, the business of international bookselling is not what you fondly imagined it to be. Fiction, so central to newspaper criticism, accounts for just a tiny proportion of the fare on offer at Frankfurt. It's swamped by vast quantities of educational publishing, academic textbooks, lovingly-produced, beautifully-illustrated and utterly pointless tomes about dogs and kittens and snakes - and ton upon ton of sheer weirdness.
Take "how to" books. On the evidence of the Frankfurt Book Fair, the number of these which are published every year is shocking. How to lose weight; and how to gain it; how to communicate with your ancestors; how to cook without grains. How To Be A Canadian. That last one, I swear, is an actual book title.
The second - and much, much stranger - thing is that although a great deal of bookselling is going on all the time, nobody is trying to sell books to you. The resemblance to a giant bookshop is deceptive. Frankfurt is really a giant literary stock exchange, and unless you're a publisher, an agent or some other kind of insider mover and shaker, most of what goes on here is baffling and oddly alienating. Put your paw on one of those tantalising books, and an eagle-eyed publisher will aim a drop-dead glare in your direction. Otherwise they studiously avoid eye contact - fearing, probably correctly, that you might be a crazed writer bent on selling them your latest masterpiece, the result of 20 years' study of, say, Celtic ritual murder ceremonies.
Happily I am here, not to sell myself, but to observe at first hand how a small country such as Ireland does its book business on the international scene.
"The Irish are minnows at this thing," admits Sinéad Mac Aodha - who, as director of Ireland Literature Exchange, has been coming to the fair for nine years now. "We occupy about 16 feet by 10 of floor space in Hall 8, so to make a splash is quite a challenge."
Nevertheless the modest cluster of Irish stands on Row C of Hall 8 creates a pleasing pool of Irishness which, if not large, is imbued with a sense of excellence. Beckett and Banville sit side by side on the ILE stand. Brendan Kennelly's Cromwell looks satisfyingly chunky in Bulgarian, while Cois Life's children's book Poll Agus A Mhac, translated into Irish from Norwegian, tells an irresistible story of the consternation which ensues when all the holes in the world disappear.
According to Mac Aodha, having two Irish writers on the Man Booker shortlist last year, in addition to Colm Tóibín's Impac triumph helped our literary fortunes abroad quite considerably. Serbian, Croatian, Dutch and Spanish translations of The Sea, and French and Portuguese translations of The Master prove the point. But the real core of ILE's business at Frankfurt is the promotion of new Irish writing - which is why it has brought along an elegant catalogue, "New Writing from Ireland", with a Seán McSweeney image on the cover and an impressive range of writing inside, from Paul Charles's hugely enjoyable crime novel Sweetwater to Oisín McGann's delightful children's book The Evil Hairdo via Richard Kearney's reflective and provocative Navigations: Selected Essays 1977-2005.
These are, respectively, the property of Brandon Press, O'Brien Press and Lilliput Press, all of whom - in the shape of publishers Steve MacDonogh, Michael O'Brien and Antony Farrell - are here somewhere, as are Fergal Tobin from Gill & Macmillan, Ronan Gallagher from New Island and Micheál Ó Conghaile from Cló Iar Chonnachta. This is a larger than usual delegation thanks to some extra funding from Culture Ireland, which allowed ILE to bring the Irish-language publishers, an extra member of staff from New Island, and Lilliput's Antony O'Farrell, who hadn't been able to get to the fair for seven years.
For a small publisher, taking the necessary time out is a luxury. But is it worth it? "Absolutely," says Farrell. "In fact the personal contact is crucial, because it's a matter of finding somebody who is as enthusiastic as you are for a particular project. You can get an agent to do it, of course - but it's more energising to do it yourself."
"It's the most important week of the year in our business and the most important business is the slow-burn business," is how Mac Aodha puts it. "Putting the right book into the right person's hands can make all the difference." As well as speaking at a seminar about government support for translation and the problems which face minority languages at the Übersetzer Zentrum (aka the Translators' Centre), she has a hectic schedule of meetings with more than 60 regular contacts over the five days of Frankfurt. Other meetings are a product of happy chance - somebody who knows somebody and comes to say hello, or somebody who just happens to be walking past the Irish stands when a title takes their fancy.
It may look casual to the uninitiated but it's clear that, eventually, these brief encounters give birth to books. A Lithuanian publisher wants Edna O'Brien's Country Girls trilogy. Helen, from China, is keen to get hold of some Frank O'Connor. An immaculate Italian woman reports that her translation of Maeve Brennan's The Visitors has sold 22,000 copies; so now she wants to do The Springs of Affection. Since it was founded in 1994, Ireland Literature Exchange has supported the translation of some 100 books into such diverse languages as Albanian, Danish, Norwegian, Polish and Romanian. For a genuine exchange to take place, however, Mac Aodha is adamant that translation into Irish is also of prime importance - and Frankfurt has a role to play in this as well, because meeting potential translators is crucial.
Hence one of the highlights of the Frankfurt week - the Irish party, which dispenses Guinness and good humour in equal measure, and attracts a sizeable crowd in spite of competing "dos" at the African and New Zealand stands. The Irish ambassador to Berlin, David Donoghue - son of Denis, and a voracious reader himself - is present, as is Cecilia West from Columba Press, whose stand is located on Row P with all the big names in religious publishing in the UK and the US. New Island's Ronan Gallagher is all smiles as he reports that there's great interest from Hungarian and Lithuanian publishers in its "Open Door" series of novellas; Maverick House's John Mooney is still totting up the number of copies sold by his torrid tale of corruption in Thailand, Welcome To Hell: "over 100,000 worldwide so far" - and Claude Costecalde of Book Link says people have been coming up to him all week to inquire about the stunning colour photographs by Chris Hill which adorn both his stand and his book Below Skies, a photographic tour of the four provinces of Ireland. Brandon's Steve McDonogh is excited about The Troubled Life of Branwell Brontë, which he's bringing out next spring. It's an excellent party - but it's a businesslike schmooze, as well.
AND THAT, SOMEBODY says, is Frankfurt for you. The themes which have dominated the 2006 book fair have been the emerging markets of India, this year's "guest of honour", and China - potentially hugely lucrative, but also hugely problematic, with issues of copyright and blatant piracy still to be addressed. However, the buzz around the Chinese section, in particular, has been obvious even to a first-time visitor. Another big talking point in the trade is whether the advance of digitisation will mean the end of bookshops as we know them, with the battle lines drawn between Google's controversial Book Search programme and those publishers who claim it shows books for free on the internet.
The demise of the book as we know it has, of course, been predicted since Gutenberg was a boy - and still the Frankfurt Book Fair marches on. A young man in a smart suit sits at a wooden table in the rain eating a bagel with a hot dog sticking out either end.
At an indoor cafe a guy in a baseball cap is fast asleep, clutching a rolled-up poster in one hand. An elegant elderly couple have their heads bent over a briefcase which turns out to be full of fossils. A voice calls from one English-language publisher to another: "There's something growing under the stairs - do you think we should tell them?" "Don't," comes the wry reply. "It could be next year's biggest seller."
