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FRANKFURT, Oct 11: Readers around the world are hungry for information on Islam, Osama bin Laden and New York, prompting new print runs and new book contracts, publishers attending the Frankfurt Book Fair said on Thursday.
The attacks on New York and Washington a month ago and the US military retaliation this week against Afghanistan’s ruling Taliban have cast a pall over the world’s biggest book fair this year, with several US publishers and authors pulling out.
The fair observed a minute’s silence on Thursday to mark a month since the first hijacked plane smashed into the World Trade Center, but the global crisis the attacks have prompted means good business for some publishers and writers.
Virago has snatched up the rights to “My Forbidden Face”, a book describing life under the Taliban, by a young woman whose name is given only as Latifa who fled Afghanistan in May, industry mouthpiece Publishing News reported on Thursday.
A new book by Claus-Martin Carlsberg on Saudi-born dissident bin Laden, Washington’s chief suspect for the attacks believed to be hiding in Afghanistan, has flown off the shelves in its first week and is already onto its third print run.
Imam Beker, a spokesman for the Islamic Association in Germany with a stand in the religion section of the book fair, said all 40 copies of a basic book about Islam in German had been snatched up in the first two days of the fair.
“It is clear there has been an increase particularly among those involved in politics and journalism in Oriental culture,” said a spokesman for Kohlhammer, a German publisher advertising translations of the Koran and books on Islam at the fair.
PUBLISHERS REACT: Palmyra Publishers, based in Heidelberg, offered discount rates for bulk purchases of a dictionary on the Middle East and a book on Islam by Mohammed Arkoun translated from French.
“Of course publishers are advertising their books relating to Islam and the relationship between cultures,” said Sabine Kaldonek, a bookfair spokeswoman.
“But the book trade reacts slowly to world events so it might take until next year to show up in rights negotiations.”
Some have moved quickly. German publisher Droemer-Weltbild hope to launch a new book on the Taliban next month.
“Normally we would sell about 5,000 to 10,000 copies of that but now we are expecting 10 times that,” said Droemer-Weltbild’s Dirk Kaufmann.
Independent distributor BHB Books is bringing out a special supplement entitled “New York — a tribute to the city and its people” to accompany a new book of photographs of the city by South Africans Gerald and Marc Hoberman.
With an initial print run of 25,000 and more expected, the book includes six glossy full-colour pictures of the World Trade Center and the New York skyline as it was before September 11.
BHB president Barbara Brackett defended the project: “I know there are a lot of disaster books coming out but we wanted to bring out something that was a monument to the glory of New York.
“We did not want to exploit the disaster. It wasn’t something that was thrown together and part of the price will go to disaster relief,” she said. —Reuters
