Frankfurt Book Fair 2019

Hey there my lovelies!

As some of you might already know I was at the Frankfurt Book Fair last weekend! XD And boy was it amazing!!! If you’re used to small book fairs (like ours in Vienna) this one most certainly will blow your mind! We walked in there and it was like: WOAH!!! There were so many publishers that I lost count of them, but according to one of the people I talked with there were about 7.000 of them! Just imagine this big number! 7.000!!!! No wonder you could have easily beaten someone with the programm! *lol* To be entirely honest my feet still hurt from all the walking but boy was it worth it! 😀

I’m so glad I managed to get there because about a week before the fair everything that could possibly go wrong actually went wrong. I swear if there was ever a week that proved „Murphy’s Law“ is an actual thing then it was the week before the fair. I had a bad cold and Saturday night we even ended up in hospital because my little one had an acute otitis media. Sunday morning the doc sent us home and on Monday our children’s doctor almost sent us to hospital for a week again. Her inflammatory markers had exploded and she had about 40 degrees fever… Which naturally caused me to be worried sick! Thanks to antibiotics she was already doing better on Tuesday though. Which would have been perfect if the next tragedy wouldn’t have hit us out of the blue…

Anyway, let’s not talk about the bad stuff and focus on the good things in life instead! I was at the Frankfurt Book Fair! YAY! XD And I definitely wasn’t the only one! If anyone ever tells you that no one reads anymore and that books are dead, send them to the Frankfurt Book Fair! There were so many people I had to get rid of some parts of my HP Gryffindor student costume in order to be able to breathe! I was in good company though because there were a lot of other Cosplayers that ran around the entire book fair area as well. 😉 I swear, some of them were really dedicated, walking in their warm costumes for hours! They certainly have all my respect because after only two hours I already looked like a sloppy Gryffindor:

The cupboard under the stairs was really the only place you actually had to yourself. *lol* If you wanted to be a part of the fair you eventually had to become a member of the crowd though! So after a while we went out of the cupboard and mingled with the mass of people once again. 😉

There were so many great authors and I got a glimpse of them when they had their book signings! The waiting line for the famous authors was so long that we gave up on it though. I really would have loved to talk to Jojo Moyes or Sebastian Fitzek but I would have had to wait for hours and there were so many other interesting things going on! So we only took pictures of them and then continued on our journey!

This said I got an autograph from Jessica Koch though! She sent me her book „So Near the Horizon“ about two years ago and asked me to read and review it. So there was no way I could miss out on the chance of talking to her! Unfortunately we were only able to exchange a couple of sentences, but it definitely was worth the long wait! ❤

Since this was my first huge book fair I learned quite a lot this weekend and I thought I’d share a little bit of this particular wisdom with you:

• There are Shuttle Busses that drive directly from the Airport (Terminal 1) to the Frankfurt Book Fair and back again. (EUR 7,50 per ride) Just be careful with the timing and frequency of those busses. For instance on Saturday they only drove between 08:00 – 12:00 a.m and the Book Fair Team as well as the Hotline gave us a wrong info. We arrived at 12:15 and waited an hour until one of those busses arrived just to find out that the bus driver was already done with his shift. We only had luck that this was the BEST BUS DRIVER EVER and that after seeing our sad faces he actually agreed to drive us to the fair! BEST BUS DRIVER EVER: If you ever read this we owe you big time! ❤ Thank you so much!
• If you want to line up for the book signing of your favourite author you better know the book publisher she/he works with. If you look up her/his signing time you’ll only find the hall she/he’s in but those halls are big and the only way to find the right booth is by looking for the publisher. It’s a lesson we had to learn the hard way. 😉
• A recommendation: Buy a weekend ticket. Day tickets cost 22 Euros and a weekend ticket costs 30. With a day ticket you can’t leave the fair grounds anymore and if you truly want to see all the publishers it’s better to have more time! We had a weekend ticket and we could leave and come as we pleased which was very convenient. XD
• Take water and food with you. The security let us pass with all our food and water bottles, which was really great because at the book fair we would have had to pay about 3 Euros for 0,20 litres. Which is A LOT of money! (They even charged 3 Euros just for water!)
• If you come directly form the airport you can store your luggage at the wardrobe. If you want to explore the entire fair ground you better take your jacket with you though. Some parts of the fair are open air and October is definitely to cold just to go out there with your shirt.
• The fair grounds are huge! So if google earth tells you, you only have to walk 7 minutes to your hotel: Don’t believe it! *lol* Dr. Google claimed we only had to walk 7 – 10 minutes to our hotel but in the end it took us about 20 minutes to get out of the fair grounds and then another 10 minutes to walk to our destination. XD

Okay, I think that’s it! For now anyway! My brain is fried and I can’t think of anything else atm! If you still have some questions you can always ask them in my comments! I won’t bite, promise! Or, well, at least not much! 😛

I had such a blast at the book fair and I met so many new authors! (Some of them even in the waiting line for other authors. *lol*) So I hope my blog post wasn’t only able to convey how much I enjoyed this weekend but also was interesting to read! Thanks for your attention!

And now to the interesting stuff: Your opinions! Did you ever visit a book fair? Was it cool or were you as blown away by it as my bestie and I? XD Which book fairs did you visit? Can you recommend me some? I really would love to hear your thoughts on this! (ideas and suggestions are always welcome! Maybe next year I’ll visit another book fair, you never know. 😉 )

*hugs’n’kisses*

The Sassy Library Fox