Vanessa Martini is the lead buyer at Green Apple Books in San Francisco, Calif. She previously worked at City Lights with Paul Yamazaki, where she learned the value of a good drink and a good talk. She was fortunate enough to attend the recent Frankfurt Book Fair on a Books Across Borders fellowship. Here are some of her thoughts about the experience:
I've been a bookseller for 12 years, but the book business is fractal: there's always more to learn. It was in this spirit that I applied for the Books Across Borders fellowship to the Frankfurt Book Fair. This industry is remarkable in so many ways, but one of them is that the high-up decision makers are unusually accessible to frontline retail workers, much more so than most retail jobs allow. Over the years I've had the great pleasure to meet editors, publishers, sales directors, marketing execs, publicists, you name it--but two groups remained elusive: agents and scouts. Who are these people and how do they do their jobs?
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| Vanessa Martini (2nd from r.) on the Bookselling in Times of War panel (with Erin Cox, Oleksii Erinchak, and Mahmoud Muna). | |
In my years of buying, it's always benefited me to learn more about the process of how a book comes to be available in a catalog. Who acquired it? Who helped shape its being? Who is in charge of shepherding it into the public eye? So when the opportunity came to see the epicenter of international acquisitions, I jumped at the chance.
The overwhelming impression I came away from the Frankfurt Book Fair with was a renewed sense of awe at just how many hands are involved in the creation of a single book. As you walk the halls--five buildings, several floors each, pavilions and stalls of every size all thronged with people from around the globe--you are reminded again that while there's typically one name on the cover of a book, at every step of the process of a book's creation there are people involved, most of whose names will never see the light of day. From the hubbub of the agents center, to stalls hawking exquisite cover materials to the finest gossamer-thin paper--someone is always there. Their hands were on the book.
And gladly, despite AI's looming presence furrowing many brows, something else that has always been a joy about bookselling was also still true: book people are the best people. I was able to articulate one reason why this is so over a glass of Sekt: "Nobody's dead inside." No one has sold their soul for money in this business–what money? No one tosses and turns at night wondering if their job is morally acceptable. And it shows in the openness to meet new people, the delight in recognizing the name of a faraway bookstore, the willingness to take time to chat with me, a bookseller, not selling or acquiring rights to anything, simply to say hello and talk shop and explain to me what they'd been doing that day.
If you're a bookseller wondering about applying for a fellowship, I can without reservation say you should. The world is full of people who want to meet you.