Frankfurter Buchmesse 2026: Report after two days of the fair
65,000 trade visitors from 130 countries / New hall layout / AI dominates the conversation / Frankfurt: where culture and politics meet
During the first two trade visitor days of the 78th Frankfurter Buchmesse (7-11 October 2026), attendance remained at the same strong level as in the previous year. A total of 65,000 trade visitors from 130 countries attended the fair on Wednesday and Thursday (7-8 October 2026) alone; the fair continues to run til Sunday evening. For the first time, trade visitors from Cabo Verde, Greenland, Guinea, the Turks and Caicos Islands and Eswatini attended the fair on the first two trade visitor days. 4,000 exhibitors are presenting their books, products and services at the leading book fair in Frankfurt. This year’s fair features more stages than before with more than 3,800 events on the fairgrounds and in the city taking place.
The once again densely packed Literary Agents & Scouts Centre (LitAg) hosted 319 agencies from 32 countries. In the LitAg and Publishers Rights Centre, 582 tables were sold in total (2025: 591 tables). Notable book deals that hit the headlines this week included independent UK publisher Magic Cat Publishing acquiring bestselling author of Chocolat Joanne Harris’s debut children’s title Once, in the Forest, and Penguin Random House UK doing a transatlantic deal with the Hachette Book Group for a new crime novel called The Protector from James Patterson and Arnold Schwarzenegger. There was also much interest in Korean literature and smaller languages with big voices.
Positive feedback on the new hall layout
This year’s fair kicked off with a new hall layout: Exhibitors with a strong B2B focus are located on the upper hall levels, while those focusing on attracting the fair’s public visitors are based on the halls’ ground levels. Juergen Boos, Director of Frankfurter Buchmesse, said: “After the first two trade days of the fair, I can say that the new hall concept has worked extremely well for our exhibitors and trade visitors. We have received very positive feedback from our exhibitors and trade visitors so far”.
CEOs on the role of AI and the importance of stories
Wednesday saw several CEOs take to the stages. At the CEO Talk, head of tonies Tobias Wann was forthright in his pronouncement that while the company had been experimenting with AI for some of its products, the Toniebox itself “will never become an AI toy”. Nigel Newton, Founder and CEO of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc, told the audience that publishing had seen many challenges over the years and he was sure that AI was yet another storm that the industry would ably weather. “Everything is still to play for. There is still time to tame the beast”, he said. Elsewhere at the Frankfurt Kids Conference, CEO of Simon & Schuster UK and International Perminder Mann discussed the importance of publishing different stories, from all over the globe. “This is the way to bring people together in a polarised world”, she explained.
Frankfurt: where culture and politics meet
At the fair’s Opening Press Conference, American historian and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jill Lepore delivered a powerful keynote, warning against a world in which our future is handed over to “a very small number of staggeringly powerful 21st century merchant princes.”
At the fair’s opening event, European Commissioner for Intergenerational Fairness, Youth, Culture and Sport, Glenn Micaleff was equally cautious about the influence of AI on the publishing industry going forwards, adding: “Artificial intelligence will give us more words than any generation before us ever had. Our responsibility is to make sure we never lose sight of the people behind them. Remember this: technology can generate words. But only people can bring them to life.” Literary speaker and Czech author Radka Denemarková said “I stand here; I have no choice, because I exist, and I’m fed up with what I’ve been hearing so often of late: that one must separate politics and literature. Everything is politics. Today’s question is quite simple: open democracy or a closed society. Literature knows the answer; that is why it is so dangerous.”