Frankfurt… a fair founded in 1454. Shortly after Johannes Gutenberg created the printing press in Mainz (only 40 km away), a group of merchants organized a small fair. Mainly manuscripts were offered. Until 1632, it was the largest book fair in Europe, when Leipzig took over and the fair ceased its activities. After the Second World War (1949), the first edition of the new forum was held in St. Paul's Church, which is still in the same place today.
Today, six centuries after the fair began, we discover a retrospective touch on one of the floors, entirely dedicated to the art of the book and its history. A happily laughing Johannes demonstratively rubs lead plates with leather rollers. He stirs artistically in ink pots, and a beautiful girl carves decorative elements on a sheet of paper in a jewel-like manner. The air smells of “rotten walnuts” from the inks, and the press makes a slightly melancholic, cracking sound with each subsequent pressure. Johannes excitedly explains various things in German (I speak to him in English, but he is unwavering) and waves the printed sheet under my nose. Yes, this is where everything we see today at the fair begins. A simple pressure on a sheet of paper that has built our world for the past six hundred years. And as Volker Bouffier (Prime Minister of the federal state of Hesse) said at the opening this year: "A book is something that can make you think, explain the world to you in the form of a story, not through 140 characters. They are a title, not an idea!".
Sinking into the corridor of the past, we come across publications from different eras, books that made history, copies with a price of over 5 million euros. It is not surprising that at the exit they asked to check my bag, and at first I didn’t even understand why. Books dedicated to natural science from 1657, to art and perspective, to children’s fairy tales from 1915, Bibles and Gospels are neatly arranged behind locked windows. Elderly gentlemen with small glasses and a bleary gaze bow before the rare editions and timidly leaf through the fragile paper. The feeling of history is in the air, and the smell of old paper is intoxicating. And at the same time, more than one or two publishing houses offer high-quality replicas of medieval manuscripts, hand-bound and dressed in leather covers with gold binding. And if you think this is kitsch, don’t kid yourself! This may be a niche market, but it may also be a great way for young book researchers to get their hands on a brilliant copy that will reveal to them not only history, but also a way of thinking. We will make a very basic reference - in 1980, the publishing house "Science and Art" commissioned by Lyudmila Zhivkova printed "The Four Gospels of Tsar Ivan Alexander", a book that has been in the British Museum since 1917. Although the edition was unique for its time and far from the best from today's point of view, it provides the basis for numerous studies among Bulgarian art historians, who have difficulty reaching the original from 1355/6. And nowadays the National Library "St. St. Cyril and Methodius" is digitizing a large part of its "Rare and Valuable" collection precisely so that young researchers can touch, albeit virtually, books from the 8th-9th centuries, without the editions themselves being threatened by the influences of the outside world.
In this sense, those publishers who direct their efforts in this characteristic form are extremely valuable.
On the other hand, just a few meters further on is the “Art books” section. A concept known to Bulgarian artists, but little known on the domestic market. These are books that are not aimed at the mass audience, their circulation is very limited, sometimes to single copies, and they have an aesthetic-artistic meaning rather than a pragmatic one. The approaches to this matter are extremely different and individual. Some rely on the emotion of the text, others on the form of the publication, and still others on the sculptural perception. We will not engage you in an analysis of every single work of art that we saw in the exhibition area, so we offer you more photos on our Facebook page.
Thus we say goodbye to Frankfurt am Main and start making plans for Leipzig. We will see you there at the end of March 2019.
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