Fairs.

(I wrote most of this in 1997. This account was originally prompted by the closure of Charlotte Street in Portsmouth.)

Fairs in medieval times were very important, in that, by bringing people together it made for safer transport and encouraged trade e.g. Persian merchants would come to famous fairs such as Stourbridge; Winchester; and St Bartholomew’s or the Bartlemy Fair (now Smithfield). There they sold everything from precious stones to herrings. One of the famous fairs was at Troyes in France, hence Troy weight, used in weighing gold

The modern fair I shall describe was held at Frankfurt-on-Main, a city founded in Germany about AD850 by Charlemagne-the-Great (the son of Peppin-the-Short and his wife Bertha-with-the-Big-Feet). Frankfurt was famous for holding two fairs each year until 1855. This city is renowned for many things and I will mention only a few. It was the birthplace of Goethe and where he lived most of his life; it is also the ancestral home of the Rothschild family.

For the last 48 years this city has been the site of a great book fair, lasting a week, and 1996 was the biggest ever in terms of space and time. There were 6,819 exhibitors or stands; and 2,417 publishing companies, all in collective shows. Each year one country is chosen as the fair's focus and this time it was Ireland. There were 27 Irish publishers; but there were also 2,539 German, 871 British and 819 American publishers, and many other countries were also represented, too numerous to name.

Being the theme country, Ireland received great attention and had the use of the circular pavilion standing right in the middle of the fair, where the popular President Mary Robinson, with Dr. Helmut Kohl, the German Chancellor and the Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, jointly opened the Fair. A tourist office was shared by people from both sides of the (Irish) Border (a historic landmark in 1997).

A large number of other Irish exhibitions were held in other parts of Frankfurt and Irish music and poetry were performed in the great Frankfurt Opera House. Paddy Doyle and many other contemporaries were there, including Gerry Adams, whose autobiography "Before the Dawn" which was published by a small company in Dingle; it has had the rights bought by United Kingdom, German, French, Greece and other countries

Rose Lynch 30-Nov-2004

19/08/2007