Frankfurt Book Fair anticipates 50% physical capacity

The Frankfurt Book Fair has said almost all the European national stands will attend this autumn’s event and it is anticipating “in real life” visitors to be at about half the levels of the last pre-pandemic fair.

FBF director Juergen Boos has had meetings over the past two weeks with national stand organisers and said: “I have been a little surprised at the support and I think we are in a time of positive uncertainty about this year’s fair. Ninety-five percent of the European national stands have committed to come and [Guest of Honour] Canada will have an English-language and Francophone stand.”

In terms of attendees, Boos said he had “both budgetary and personal predictions. We are budgeting for physical exhibitors at about 50% of 2019 levels, but my prediction is that it will be a lot higher as many will make the decisions to come more at the last minute and I think it’s possible to perhaps get up to 70% of where we were two years ago”. The 2019 fair had just over 302,000 visitors, including the general public, and 7,450 exhibiting companies and organisations.

Of those 7,450 exhibitors in 2019, 355 were in the Lit.Ag rights centre. Boos said that to date 100 literary and scouting agencies had booked Lit.Ag tables but “again, I think we will see a later take up”.

The layout for this year’s edition, which runs from 20th to 24th October, will replicate the same number of halls as 2019, though with more space between stands and wider aisles. Exhibition prices have been reduced from what 2020 levels would have been, helped by funding from German central government and the state of Hesse. Boos said that funding will enable FBF to give full refunds to exhibitors who are unable to attend the fair if Covid-19 levels spike again.

FBF 2021 will forge ahead with its plans for a hybrid fair, with its online programme to be announced mid-July and informed “by the learnings we had from last year’s virtual fair”, Boos said. Currently, the plan is for the online offering to be free but Boos said FBF would be closely monitoring the upcoming Bologna and London book fairs, both of which have moved to paid-for models for their virtual seminars and conferences.

Boos said he could not reveal the fair’s financial numbers from pandemic-hit 2020 but “we took a massive, massive hit”. That led to a “painful restructure” which included FBF shuttering its international offices and an overall reduction in headcount with redundancies for long-serving staffers such as vice-president of English language development Thomas Minkus, business development vice-president Holger Volland and marketing and communications director Katja B√∂hne.