Today was the last day of the biggest book fair in the world for the general public and Catherine insisted in going there. So we went.

Actually I never really understood what the point of this book fair was. For the private visitor I mean. There are many books you can flick through like in a bookshop. The disadvantage though is that you usually can't buy them. OK, there are much more books than in probably any bookshop of the world, in all different languages ranging from German, English, French, Arabic, Chinese and God knows which exotic language. But why is this thing called a fair if the private visitor cannot exchange his cash against the books? I guess the more appropriate name for this event would be exhibition but probably out of traditional reasons and the fact that it actually is a market place but only for authors, booksellers and publishing houses it is still called a fair.

Anyways we spent about six hours there and I calculated that if I saw one book cover every ten seconds (which is a reasonable estimate) in total I would have looked at 2,000 of those covers. And I have to admit that I do not remember one of them.

In addition to the books there are readings of them (mostly by the authors), the authors sign their books and there are interviews. You also can get demo CD-ROMs, prospectus, gadgets etc. So in the end I left the fairground with a bag with a selection of those and the ticket price wasn't spend for nothing.

The people working at the stands are usually very helpful but not always competent. In a side alley of the enormous hall 8 which was mainly reserved for English books there was a Croatian stand selling maps for children (I am looking for a birthday present for my seven year old nephew). Rather nice maps with lots of pictures of the sights of the different cities and regions. Obviously there were no maps left to buy when I arrived. And when I asked the guy at the stand where those maps were published in Germany he couldn't tell me. All he knew was that the maps were translated in 24 languages and that the company was absolutely new and still hadn't got a website. Looking at one of those maps in detail I found out about the German publisher. Though the maps were quite original I fear that the company will not survive for very long with a similar marketing policy.

I checked two books about music at the fair. The first one was brand-new and the translation was called Der Beatles Sound. A book by Andy Babiuk, an American musician and consultant of the Rockn & Roll Hall of Fame. A nicely layouted big format hardcover on the Beatles and the instruments and recording techniques they used throughout their career. There were some interesting facts in there. I recall that it was mentioned that Lennon learnt a special guitar picking technique from Donovan when they were in India with the Maharishi. A technique he later used on Across the Universe. For 50 € this book would be a rather nice Christmas present.

I also read a couple of pages of Johnny Rogan's book on The Smiths called Morrissey & Marr: The Severed Alliance. The bits I read were rather underwhelming but I liked the story about Panic, the most popular Smiths song. Morrissey wrote the lyrics after he had heard a BBC radio 1 DJ pass a Wham! song on the radio right after the news on the Chernobyl disaster in 1986 which he found rather inappropriate. The funny thing is that the same DJ who didn't use to play The Smiths really liked the song and apparently passed the record several times on air. Remember the chorus goes Hang the DJ. Hang the DJ. Hang the DJ.

That might be a strange ending of this post but I can't think of a better one.