UNLIKE JACK, I enjoyed going to Frankfurt’s giant annual book market for publishers. It is the size of several football fields laid side by side and layered one over another in several halls. It’s noisy, smells of spicy sausage, sauerkraut, wet socks (it usually rains during the fair), sweat, anxiety, and fear. Each year there are the “big books” that everyone talks about and the quiet future bestsellers that no one mentions. Back in the eighties and nineties, and even in the mid-seventies, every publishing house worth mentioning and every literary agent worthy of the designation would be at the fair, displaying wares and ready to make deals.I We all arrived hopeful and some of us scurried home carrying the burden of failure. Able to speak five languages reasonably well, I enjoyed the company of publishers from other countries, many of whom became lifelong friends.
Key Porter’s first employee, Lorraine Durham, came with me to help sell our book ideas. She had great instincts for what would make saleable books, she had the necessary editorial skills, was well organized—I had always lacked a talent for tidiness—and, as Julian used to say, “she could charm the birds out of the trees.” I had found Lorraine at Key. She was about twenty-five years old, six feet tall, with blond hair, the figure of a fashion model, and a smile that could melt the hearts of even the toughest German and Japanese book buyers. The Australians nicknamed her “Petal” for her instant blush when confronted by Aussie humour.
* * *
ONE OF MY Frankfurt friends, Jürgen Braunschweiger of the regrettably named Reich Verlag, invited me to join a loosely knit organization called Motovun, named after a small medieval town on top of a conical hill on Yugoslavia’s Istrian Peninsula. At least, the last time I saw it, there was still a Yugoslavia for it to belong to.
We were all encouraged to bring our plans for illustrated books, our husbands, wives, and children. Catherine and Julia came a couple of times, and Julian once. Bato Tomašević, the elegant Motovun president during the years I attended, was born in Montenegro but viewed himself as resolutely Yugoslav and tried to bring together publishers from both sides of the Iron Curtain at a time when the Cold War was still frigid and the two sides rarely met.II Bato was president of Revija, a Belgrade publishing house.
There were also publishers from Denmark, China, Bulgaria, West Germany, Italy, Yugoslavia of course, Finland, France, Norway, Sweden, Poland, the UK, the United States, and one Canadian, me. Some of the original members, including Jürgen, had bought and renovated houses in the village. One of the annual meetings was held on a ship sailing from Dubrovnik to Venice. Both Catherine and my mother—she was complimented by all on her startling green eyes—came that time.
Today Motovun is in Croatia and the house where we used to meet has been confiscated by the government. Bato, who had dreamt of a peaceful country undivided by racial strife and long memories of past battles won and lost, had the distinction of being condemned to death by both Croatia and Serbia. The sentence had less to do with his publishing and more with his having been head of Yugoslav television before the country descended into violence and ethnic cleansing.III
An exceptionally pretty Canada book was suggested by Jürgen and endorsed by the Italian Automobile Club for its book club. I consulted Ken Lefolii, freshly arrived at Key after Michael bought a small “what’s on” magazine called Toronto Calendar, which Ken had been running. Now he became one of the group of bright people around those offices, a guy with a lot of ideas and not much to do.
Ken Lefolii had been the hero of the legendary 1964 Maclean’s magazine mass walkout that saw most of the great names in Canadian journalism—Peter Gzowski, Harry Bruce, Bob Fulford, and Ken himself—resign en masse in the wake of his firing. It had been a point of principle: no editorial interference by management. Ken talked Jack Batten, who was a copy editor at the time, out of joining the others. Instead, he persuaded the new editor, his replacement, to promote Jack to writer—a job in which he has thrived ever since. “I thank Ken practically every time I see him,” Jack says.
Peter Gzowski and Ken remained friends. Natural storytellers, they sparked off each other, they made everyone laugh. They also shared a passion for horses and racing, buying a yearling together for ten thousand dollars, a princely sum for two writers. They had hoped to make a fortune when it was sold. It hadn’t worked out that way. As Peter recalled, Johnny Canuck, the horse, had “lacked heart.” As did the wooden yawl they also bought together. It sank.
I asked Bob Fulford to write the text for our soon-to-be beautiful Canada book. The photographs came from one of the National Film Board Still Division’s favourite sons, John de Visser, who had photographed every part of Canada. He was willing to go back and reshoot anything we felt needed an update.
Ken and I assembled and edited the book. I do not recall much about the process except that we laughed a lot and drank a lot of wine at various eateries along Church and Front Streets, while coming up with captions that didn’t repeat other captions. It’s not surprising that after my immersion in nationalism, the title would be Canada: A Celebration.
The book was published in ten countries in twelve languages, including Serbo-Croatian, and was still more or less in print when I last looked on Amazon. It spawned a line of illustrated books that we published over the years. In fact, it was such a success that at our traditional Key Porter Friday afternoon pub times, we all vied for the silliest illustrated book ideas to which we could append “a celebration” or “a tribute.” But Canada: A Celebration also proved that books about our country could sell internationally and open new doors for Canadian photographers and writers.
It was an exciting prospect.
I. In 1997 I wrote a mystery set at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The Bookfair Murders was that year one of “the books of the fair.” It was later made into a very forgettable TV movie.
II. Bato’s book Life and Death in the Balkans is a fascinating memoir, now published in twelve languages.
III. The Motovun Group still meets but in other countries.