My FBF: Jeremy Trevathan, managing director, adult publishing; Pan Macmillan

I have been going to Frankfurt since 1989, so it’s been over 30 years, give or take a lockdown or two. My first Frankfurt I was transitioning from production manager at Penguin Books to working in the rights team. I was there as a newly fledged rights assistant, although I had worked closely with the team on various co-edition projects. It was quite a step down in order to recalibrate my career. I had to run around delivering messages, making tea and being at the beck and call of my very busy rights colleagues.

But towards the end of the fair I was given a chance to try and drum up a German-language co-edition deal for a project which hadn’t been getting traction in the meetings. I was sent to cold call on publishers’ stands in the German halls with a paper-airplane book of flying dragons, including a fully constructed paper pterodactyl. I walked through those halls looking at the different publishers’ stands and, if I saw a possible opportunity, I went on the stand, waved the paper pterodactyl about and asked to meet someone. And by this basic method I eventually secured a 60,000-copy order for a co-edition! Probably my first deal.

My favourite Frankfurt parties were Jamie Byng’s legendary Canongate parties. They were all so very, very cool—or should I say kewl—that I can’t actually remember anything about them. Except they were really good. That is the sign of a fantastic party. My colleagues at Rowohlt had a really fun party last year in the centre of old Frankfurt, which was almost exclusively German publishers and authors. They were all so lovely and funny. It was a real blast.

One of my favourite memories was the year the Nobel Prize for Literature was to be announced at the fair. Shortly before the announcement, TV crews appeared in the aisle between the Penguin stand and our much smaller Pan Macmillan stand and set up their cameras pointing at Penguin. We all assumed a Penguin author had won. Then suddenly all the cameras swung round dramatically, switched on their lights and we were left blinking into the glare of global publicity as it was announced that Sir Vidia Naipaul had won the award. We were all taken completely by surprise, including then-Picador publisher Peter Straus.

My other great memory was the surreal experience of speaking to Robert Redford on the stand. I was rights director at Pan Mac by then and running a major US auction for Redford’s authorised biography. We had broken the news of the book at the fair and the international media were all over it. Again, there were TV cameras filming me at my little table. One of our receptionists interrupted my meeting to say that Redford was on the phone and wanted to speak to me right now.

The TV cameras followed me across the stand to the front desk, journalists babbling in the background. Redford was a little surprised that it was such big news. He had seen it in the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune and he was watching me on the news in the US talking to him on the phone, live. I had the bizarre experience of quietly calming him down and explaining to him that he was actually very famous…