Great Blog

It was a turbulent week in Finnish book publishing. A week ago two of the most respected publishing professionals in the country left their long-time employer WSOY saying they were going to start their own house. The two men are brothers Touko and Aleksi Siltala, respectively the (now former) literary director and the non-fiction director of Finland’s biggest publishing house. A few big names from WSOY’s list, among them three former Finlandia Prize winners, have said that they would follow the brothers to their new venture. A few other big ones have already rushed to say that they will not.

Something similar happened on my watch at Tammi Publishers when some key employees left and founded Teos Publishers. In the quiet garden of publishing something like this is always a storm that rips and rearranges. The way I see it in retrospect is that literature needs big publishing to stay relevant, but it also needs small publishing to stay good. Big publishers keep books in the stores and in the media, but at times they forget to give passion and curiosity the role they need to guarantee the long-term vitality of the program.

“We are the good guys, but they are not the bad ones”, said an (American) independent publisher to me once when we were talking about big publishing. “They are boring – and that is even worse.”

The best guarantee against boredom is probably a healthy undergrowth of competent small publishers.

Another somewhat dramatic piece of book news was that Finland is not going to be the Guest of Honour country at he Frankfurt Book Fair in 2011. Well, if not in 2011, why not a few years later, I hear people saying. Sometimes setbacks are needed to sharpen your approach.

The annual mega gathering of publishing professionals ended in Frankfurt last weekend. I did not go, but those who did, say it was a good book fair. For me it became a great fair when I received an excited phone call from the fairgrounds telling me that the our Minister of Culture Stefan Wallin had submitted Finland’s letter of intent to the Buchmesse to become the Guest of Honour in 2011.

It is bold move for Finland. It is going to cost a lot, and it is going to take a lot to put together an interesting presentation, but it is also an amazing possibility. I did a feasibilty study on The Guest of Honour programme for the Finnish Literature Information Centre (FILI) in the spring and - although I have visited the bookfair nine times - I had never before understood what an amazing reach the Guest of Honour status and programme have in German-Speaking Europe. It is like buying the Super Bowl half-time ad in the cultural life of Germany. No one can escape you. The book Fair is the biggest annual cultural event in Germany and 40% of the media attention is dedicated to the Guest of Honour. This is because the the guest country is the news every year, everything else stays pretty much the same.

So it is not really an honour, or an exhibition - it is a huge medium, and it is available to the guest country for the whole year, all around Germany. For Finnish literature, Germany has been the spring-board to the rest of the world for long. If Finland gets the status – Iceland is applying too but we remain convinced of our chances – well have much more than a spring-board, we’ll have a literary trampoline the size of Germany to show what we’ve got. Better start getting ready for the show…