What do you do on a rainy, misty sunday in Frankfurt? Right, you grab a friend and go to the annual book fair. Surely I would have went if it had been sunny, because what the Oktoberfest is to beer-lovers, the book fair is to book lovers.

This years guest of honor was China. Walking through I was not really aware of that; they were not as present as the last guest of honors had been in the past years. A reason for this may be the controversy concerning the human rights, or maybe I was just too busy with avoiding all the offers for magazine subscriptions. The tickets are quite expensive ($20) if you are not a student ($10). But for those, who are really interested in books (and also art, they had a hugs art section this time) it is definetly worth the money. The book fair is open to visitors only on the weekend of the week it is there, but although it may be really packed, I still suggest you go on Sunday. It is the only day where you can actually buy the books you see there and if you are lucky, you may even get some books for free too.

As always, you get a big bag at the beginning to put in all your magazines, newspapers, books [...] you get throughout the day. Of course you think “Oh, this bag will be enough for the whole day” – ha! After two hours the bag was too heavy to carry that I had to put in a checkroom and pick it up later. Where was the guy to carry the bag for me? ;) Everything was pretty much organized so that you could really pick out what you wanted to see. Walking through, you also saw weird things like a book called “And God was chilling”, where you were just shaking your head. A few authors and publishers where there also, but the masses of people where horrendous so that I did not feel up to it. I rather stood on line for a free coffee instead.

What I also realized was that the so called “e Books” were not much represented at the fair as I thought they would be. Here in Germany they have been the it-item to have soon, so I actually expected more. Luckily, the fair still concentrated on the “real” books – yay! Personally, I cannot get used to the idea of reading a big book on a screen. I want to turn pages by hand and at the end put the book on a shelf.

All in all the book fair was huge, so you really have set priorities what you want to see. We were there for five hours and really did not see everything – we saw the basics and that was enough. It was a nice spent day there and next year I think I will be going again.