It is however a neat lesson in how the book fair works: for as long as people have written books, people have sold them too, and this involves a certain amount of talking things up. Erasmus, in the 15th century, is said to have drummed up business here (the fair’s been going for 800-odd years) by claiming the first print run of his Colloquies was 24,000. And this in an age when the average number of copies produced was around 50.
On Frankfurt
October 15th, 2007 · 1 Comment
by Kassia Krozser
File Under: Quote of the Week
1 response so far ↓
Gillian Spraggs // Oct 15, 2007 at 9:56 am
I don’t know precisely how inaccurate her picture of present-day publishing is, but her history is pretty unreliable. Erasmus’s Colloquies is not a work of theology but a collection of Latin dialogues, which was widely used as a school text for pupils beginning Latin. I’ve no idea how many copies it sold, or whether Erasmus misrepresented the figures, but I imagine a lot of units were shifted: it’s normally the case with standard textbooks.
As for The Lord of the Rings – it was neither published by Faber nor found in a slush pile. It began life when the publisher Stanley Unwin solicited a sequel to The Hobbit.