Welcome to the London Book Fair, Where Everyone Knows Their Place

The London Book Fair was held over three days in the cavernous Kensington Olympia exhibition center.Credit…Sam Bush for The New York Times Everybody knows that the publishing industry is a rigorously stratified world, characterized by a reverence for hierarchy and a near-fanatical observance of ritual. Or maybe we suspect as much — but for those who would like to have those beliefs starkly confirmed, I would recommend a visit to the London Book Fair, which took place in the city’s Kensington district this week. The fair, which this year had over 1,000 exhibitors and something like 30,000 visitors, is one of the biggest events of the international publishing calendar. For three days, agents, editors, publishers, scouts and many other people whose jobs are harder to explain gather in a frenzied fashion, primarily to sell and buy foreign rights for English-language books, but also to take temperatures, observe prevailing winds and scheme. For those who weren’t there to close deals, the fair offered the opportunity to map out the minutely graded power structure of the publishing industry. Just inside the doors of the cavernous Olympia exhibition space, the Penguin Random House stand was on the right, its entrance staffed by a row of tightly smiling assistants. The HarperCollins stand was on the left, with assistants gently standing guard over the editors inside, who were taking one meeting after another at little white tables, standing up every half an hour to greet another delegation of international publishers, smiles unflagging, notebooks poised. Beyond that was Simon and Schuster, and a pavilion with all the French publishing houses collected together, then Macmillan to the left, across the aisle from the German Pavilion, which faced Hachette. Everything radiated outward from this central core across two carpeted floors, in diminishing order of importance: the slightly smaller publishing houses, then the ones whose best years are behind them, then the niche ones, then the flatly obscure. The positioning of the national pavilions followed the same brutal logic. The ghostwriting firms were on the second floor; the logistics firms were on the first. Literary Translation Center: second […]

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