He already has a cold. “It’s always like that in the week before the book fair.” So everything goes as usual. At least the weather is playing a role in Juergen Boo's fight against the cough this time. It's supposed to be mild at the book show, with a good 20 degrees predicted for the opening on Tuesday, and there should be a lot of sun on the following days too. The book fair is early this year, climate change is giving the whole thing another little push, but Boos also knows rainy, cold and dark fairs, which were more common at the beginning of his time at the top than they are today.
A lot has changed in the past 21 years. And as head of the only book fair in the world, to which everyone flocks, from well-connected trade visitors from overseas to completely disorientated German readers, Boos has always tried to steer, direct and shape change.
“For me, change was always normal,” he says in the book’s Frankfurt house. That means: he liked her. While others looked rather bleakly into the future: "During my apprenticeship as a publishing bookseller, we had the first copy machine. That's when I heard for the first time that the end was near." He later taught manufacturers and explained price fixing and marketing to them: “Changes were always inevitable in the industry.”
How stories are told and where they happen has changed massively over the past two decades. Film, games, streaming services - Boos quickly tried to connect other creative industries to the fair, with a presence at the book show and pitching events such as "Books at Berlinale": "We always tried to capture trends. After we made film, it also existed elsewhere."
But he also indulges in a bit of technology nostalgia. He is currently reading two books that sing the praises of the pencil: “Actually, it’s not that bad.” The pencil he picks up comes from the Czech guest country appearance at the Leipzig Book Fair 2019. Now the Czech Republic is the last guest country of his time at the Frankfurt summit. This is the perfect ending for Boos. Tomáš Kubíček, now director of the Czech guest country presence, was the representative for Eastern Europe during Boos' time as publishing manager at Springer Science + Business Media. And the Moravian State Library in Brno, which Kubíček now runs, preserves the legacy of Milan Kundera, whom Boos greatly admired during his time at Hanser: “These are arches that are important to me.”
He was born in Lörrach in 1961, and at the age of 15 he visited the Frankfurt exhibition halls for the first time, accompanied by his uncle, a bookseller: “It continues throughout life.” He is excited to see what it will feel like to soon take on an unfamiliar perspective. Maybe there's a good thing about that, he seems to think a little doubtfully: "Not having to look at what's going wrong or having to think about whether you missed someone is certainly quite pleasant."
It is all the better for him that there is still a whole fair to come, from the presentation of the German Book Prize on the evening before the book show to the awarding of the Peace Prize in the Paulskirche. He has stayed in Heidelberg all these years, but this year he is also moving to Frankfurt on the Saturday before the trade fair. When business is being done with important international guests at the “Frankfurter Hof” on Monday and Tuesday before the opening ceremony, he is also right in the middle of it. “And in the Starbucks across the street are the German agents who find the Frankfurter Hof too expensive.”
In his view, the politicization of the trade fair has increased over the years. As early as 1968, social and political conflicts were often brought to the trade fair by exhibitors, authors and visitors. Nevertheless, this time feels like a protected ivory tower to him. Today, on the one hand, there is social media, which allowed black German authors to strongly influence the fair through their boycott in 2021, even though they were not present, but on the other hand, there is also the “Frankfurt Calling” program curated by the book fair itself, which consciously brings political topics into the halls: “I was happy to make the book fair more of a discussion forum, despite the sometimes very difficult situation.”
The crises he alludes to have occurred again and again, from democratically dubious guest countries like China to the presence of right-wing radical and right-wing extremist publishers at the fair to the appearance of Slavoj Žižek, who as the Slovenian opening speaker in October 2023 called for more attention to Palestine shortly after the Hamas massacre.
In such situations it is important to “know what our core is” and to persevere: “To say that we are afraid and therefore not doing something, that would have been the worst case scenario for us.” For Boos, the core is the free speech, the clear pronunciation, the conversation. Right-wing publishers, boycotts, the emotions that all of this aroused in visitors - he was always of the opinion: "You can talk about that, you should talk about that, you should talk about that here."
When he thinks back to the hairiest moments, the first thing that comes to mind is the corona pandemic, “an incredible collapse”. Shortly before the opening, the book fair had to be canceled in October 2020 due to the rapidly increasing number of infections and only took place digitally. Not knowing whether we will continue to be supported by the federal government, state and city with millions of euros in funding and good trade fair conditions as tenants of the exhibition halls - these were difficult years. “But the worst encounter for me was when Mr. Kubitschek and I stood opposite each other in Hall 4 and yelled at each other.” From 2017 to 2019, Götz Kubitschek, an activist in the new right movement, used the fair as a stage to sow social discord. The fact that a voice arose from the middle of the book show “that was so against the book fair and plurality was a shock to me,” says Boos.
The reconstruction years after the pandemic finally brought what he calls the “change from reader to fan”: “People are willing to wait four hours for Sebastian Fitzek.” Which shows that fandom is not limited to the growth segment of romance: "It was very clear that we have to become more accessible. If people want to have a personal encounter with the author, we have to offer it to them. We can't put an author on the stage and 4,000 people sit across from him. They all want the encounter." Even if it's just for the brief moment of a selfie.
Boos has nothing against it: “Books are there to be touched.” And where else can you see so many English, Turkish or Spanish titles? He is therefore completely in agreement with the book sales on public days that were introduced after the pandemic: “I could imagine that this will become even more visible in the near future.” Because over its five days, the Frankfurt Book Fair is actually, in addition to what it usually is, also the “largest international bookstore in the world”.
Boos initiated one last, massive change with this trade fair. What sets Frankfurt apart is that it is "very consciously both", a fair for the rights trade and a public fair at the same time, unlike its competitors in Bologna or London, which are purely rights fairs for children's books and the English-speaking world, or large public fairs like Cairo or Buenos Aires: "Hundreds of thousands of visitors, even though the country is economically in ruins." Every book fair has a different character: “Equal coexistence is Frankfurt’s strength.”
Nevertheless, there are exhibitors who are very interested in the audience and those for whom the rights business is all that matters. That's why some are getting the ground floors this year, so that on public days readers can easily walk from hall to hall and across the agora between them, while the upper floors offer space for exhibitors who are looking to do business. It is another attempt to balance Frankfurt's dual nature. That's sometimes difficult, says Boos, but it's still the best way: "We could take one side. But then we lose the other part."
He started at the book fair in 2005, and the following year at Catalan culture he experienced for the first time what political explosiveness the guest country appearance can have in the respective guest countries of honor. He remembers very fondly Turkey, which at that time still had a more liberal Erdoğan at the helm: “The association of kebab manufacturers alone brought hundreds of visitors to the trade fair.” He thinks back to trade fair visitors like Salman Rushdie and David Hockney, who smoked in every corner: “You always knew where he was because the smoke was rising there.”
Boos is about people and encounters. He is happy to be accompanied before and during the trade fair by his successor Joachim Kaufmann, to point out things that were important to him and to ask himself and Kaufmann: "How will it be for you? Does the new concept work? Do we need to think about it further?"
He asks himself what he plans to do when the trade fair is over and Kaufmann takes over: "It's my first retirement. I have no idea what will happen. Something between repairing bicycles and studying philosophy."
