In the following well-known quotation, try substituting ‘the Frankfurt Book Fair’ for ‘Fight Club’ and ‘meeting’ for ‘fight’:

‘Welcome to Fight Club. The first rule of Fight Club is: you do not talk about Fight Club. The second rule of Fight Club is: you DO NOT talk about Fight Club! Third rule of Fight Club: if someone yells "stop!", goes limp, or taps out, the fight is over…’

And so on. Every year, however, the arts desk of a British or American newspaper ignores these simple rules and dispatches a reporter to the Frankfurt Book Fair to write a breathless, cliché-ridden account of meetings between ‘publishing powerbrokers’ and ‘über-agents’, with plenty of comment on the protagonists’ clothes and the ocean of alcohol which sustains the whole circus. Nobody comes out of these pieces well.

The truth of it is that attending Frankfurt for five days involves something like 75 scheduled half-hour meetings, a couple of hundred more serendipitous encounters, and numberless drinks appointments, dinners and parties. Publishing is at any time an immense talking-shop of competing evangelisms and hyperbole, but Frankfurt is its Babel.

Traditionally, the primary objective is to buy and sell territorial rights in books. But these days the deal-making is increasingly conducted away from the Fair – in the frenetic weeks of submissions and auctions before and the more sober weeks that follow – bringing to the fore the Fair’s more diffuse but higher purpose: to find people with similar tastes and aims in their publishing, to campaign for one’s books, to make alliances that will pay off months or years down the line.

At its best, Frankfurt has a clarity of purpose and a vivifying sense that all things are possible. It is the scene for talking over shared enthusiasms and for reviewing successes and heroic failures alike. As a result, a strange intensity takes over. An editor friend at a German publishing house told me that as he was leaving the labyrinthine agents’ centre at 6pm on the last day of the fair a security guard was quietly wiping tears from her eyes. ‘I can’t believe it’s over,’ she said, ‘and that you’re all going for another year’. It is hard to imagine the same scene occurring at whichever trade convention takes over the immense exhibition hangars in the week after the Book Fair.