A Frankfurt Book Fair novel by Jonathan Galassi

Fiction: 'The Fair'

April 7, 2015

By Jonathan Galassi - Vice

Photos by Matthew Leifheit and Cynthia Talmadge

Excerpted from Muse by Jonathan Galassi. Copyright 2015 by Jonathan Galassi. Excerpted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House LLC. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

The modern-day Frankfurt Book Fair was a postwar phenomenon, a vehicle for easing the readmission of Germany into the company of civilized Western societies. Originally, it had been a phenomenon of the Renaissance, Frankfurt being the largest trading center near Mainz, where Johannes Gutenberg and his fellows had invented movable type in the late 1430s. The fair was established again in 1949 and grew into the most important annual gathering in international publishing. Every October, tens of thousands of publishers from all over the world scurried like so many ants among the warehouse-like halls of the fair's bleak campus on the edge of the city center, rushing to appointments with their counterparts.

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