That NYT piece about LBF??

This meeting could not have been an email, and other things they got wrong

Well it’s no surprise that the critic the NYT hired to attend the London Book Fair wrote a truly laughable article, akin to a court reporter walking into a courtroom and assessing where everyone is sitting. (“Judge: front. Jury: side.” Really? Is that the best you’ve got?)

What is clear to me, upon reading the piece, is that the NYT reporter has no clue what happens at the London Book Fair, and frankly did a mediocre job trying to figure it out. Maybe she should have talked to a film scout, to find out about the massive new novel from a famous writer which slipped during the fair, people racing to their phones to try to get a hold of it. Or the book of the fair, a Japanese novel whose name I won’t mention but which seems delightfully weird and twisty. Maybe she could have extrapolated on what it might mean for a book of the fair to be an extremely dark novel about murder, from Japan, and done a deep dive into why Japanese literature is exploding right now (she could have talked to co-agents or editors who have acquired the novel, after all, they were all right there). Or she could have talked about the Jewish books which are selling right now, whether a story of friendship during and after the Holocaust or an ambitious history of Judaism and anti-zionism which have sold to top editors in the business and are poised to make a big splash in 2025/2026. She could have placed those books next to the variety of Palestinian voices being championed across the fair, drawing a line from last Frankfurts’ cancellation of a book prize to the Palestinian writer Adania Shibli to the direct and widespread support of Palestinian voices, among them Yasmin Zaher, author of the forthcoming book THE COIN, which I read and loved and which my German client bought. She could have followed that deeply interesting conundrum (a German editor buys a Palestinian debut novel - the geopolitical implications!) — she could have talked about what literature does in the world, critiqued its soft power while acknowledging the ability of knowledge-production to set the stage for activism. She could have further explored the cross-cultural political dynamics playing out through business, through friendships, through conversations at each of those tiny tables (and yes, the meetings on the floor) of the IRC.

I might have mentioned my meetings with Israeli editors, all of whom voice feelings and thoughts on what work is happening in their country right now, the vague sense of paranoia and anger and exhaustion that surrounds them when they talk about buying books, about the stories and narratives of their own country. Or Chinese editors, hearing about books that critique China and carefully, politely saying, “it would be hard for us.”

You gather a group of international people — from Europe, Brazil, China, Taiwan, Korea, Russia, America, and more — whose job it is to be clued into their political and cultural movements, their specific economies, the interests of a population, the stories that people want to hear at that moment, in other words, who value and pay attention, professionally, to the feeling of a country — and you’re here to tell me the NYT reporter had nothing more to say then “this meeting could have been an email”?? Seriously?? Ask a goddamn question!

To be fair, it isn’t all glamorous intellectual conversation (in fact, it rarely is). We (those people sitting at the little tables atop the purple carpet, having endless meetings for 8 hours a day) are nearly delirious with exhaustion. We are in close quarters with our bosses and colleagues, showing off or showing up or proving ourselves for a week and a half straight (shorter, for those of us who don’t come early to meet with UK folks). We’ve worked our asses off for approximately two months beforehand to make sure we know what stories we are selling, what stories we are buying, what books and authors and sales we are talking about. It’s exhausting. But what is happening is actually an exchange of somewhat coded information, available only to those for whom names, numbers, and book titles mean something - for whom the relational world we operate in is navigatable. Taste in books is personal; a name means something, a style, a vibe, a sense of smallness or importance. This information, provided by scouts, allows foreign editors to know which books are worth paying attention to, while scouts gather tidbits about what is working in each market, and each country.

When 5pm comes we head to The Cumberland Arms, the pub around the corner (The NYT critic may have missed this, as it wasn’t included in the Olympia floor plan) and catch up with friends we’ve known for years or new editors/agents/scouts we’ve never met before. At a booth there this year, over a lager, a friend pitched me a romance novel called “Ice Planet Barbarians” which remains the funniest pitch I’ve ever heard in my life (Seven humans get stranded on a planet full of Blue Avatar People. No plot, only sex). I love to laugh at how absolutely insane people’s minds can be, not only to write that book but then to sell it, to a hungry audience. For work, I read mostly non-fiction and literary novels - but Ice Planet Barbarians is a reminder that there is much, much more out there.

You have to be a certain type of person to enjoy the book fair: the first pre-requisite is loving books, the second is loving people. Perhaps the two don’t always go hand-in-hand, but if you work in publishing my sense is we are all birds of a feather. Doesn’t matter where you come from in the world; you can see on someone’s face when they are in love with a book, and it lights you up, makes you want to see the world through their eyes, that book’s eyes, makes you think that something might entertain you, explain the previously unexplainable, help slow everything down. The critic got that right, at least — that feeling could not have been an email.

And of course, aside from the meetings, there are the parties. I have it on good authority that after UK publishing house Canongate closed their party around 2am this year a group of maybe thirty people headed to the Canongate offices with some beers and a Bluetooth speaker. When editors came into the offices the next morning for work, people were still there. (The lore goes that supposedly Mick Jagger attended the Canongate party one year. Can’t confirm I’ve ever seen him, but last year at Frankfurt Patti Smith was just wandering alone around the Hof, looking slightly lost). How iconic, how fun, how absolutely ridiculous is that. Glamorous, maybe from the (far) outside, but from the inside I am highly aware that I read books for a living, mostly in bed, in my sweatpants.

At the fairs, we share lovely little bits of gossip that don’t matter to anyone but us; big name folks who did something embarrassing, a publishing couple having an affair, that kind of thing. Obviously, we who work in the story-business like to talk, but we also know that none of the gossip actually matters that much. It’s not the be all and end-all of anyone’s career (cough, especially not Niclas Salomonsson, despite how the Swedish news media tried). We gossip, yes, but another word for it is connecting. Does anyone not gossip at a work party, in any industry? Is this somehow unique to publishing? The truth is at the book fair we get together and hang out, chat, wake up in the morning dead-tired and pop two advil then go to all-day meetings where we talk about the same twelve books over and over again because the rest aren’t interesting or good for foreign or film. But sure, let’s agree to mythologize it.

Publishing may rely on tradition, hierarchy, and ritual, but the drive behind that is that books, ideas, engagement in the world, engagement with each other should be fun. It should make us feel good. Reading should not be considered a solitary activity. I can’t think of anything less capitalistic, less dystopian, less reminiscent of the current moment than enjoying a good party, thrown by, yes, our jobs, celebrating weird networking far from home, keeping alive the traditional publishing history of debauchery and drinking. So, while I find intriguing that the NYT landed on the note “book fairs remind us that books matter”, that could not be further from my own experience - book fairs remind us that when you are deliriously exhausted and drinking with colleagues, you might just end up at a publishing office chatting until 4am.

So, how was the London Book Fair this year? It was lively, vivacious. There was plenty of advil and coffee that tastes like dirt-water and news about a just-announced biography from CAA, discussion about the amount of money a Hungarian publisher should spend on a pre-empt. It’s all inside baseball. It matters, but only to us. Maybe next time the Times can devote 800 words to an equally shallow waste-of-space article on, say, hating books and people. Would have been just as useful.