Based on intensive fieldwork at the Frankfurt, London and Tokyo Book Fairs, this chapter describes the role of international book fairs in the publishing industry and analyzes how, by bringing participants together in short-term, face-to-face interaction in a structured environment, they define and reassert the economic, social and symbolic values that constitute the overall field of publishing.

In many respects, international book fairs comply with the criteria set out by Arjun Appadurai (1986: 21) in his seminal discussion of ‘tournaments of value’ discussed in the Introduction to this book. The criteria that he lays out regarding such tournaments’ spatial and temporal removal from the routine of everyday economic life, the status contests engaged in by participants and the relevance of their outcomes for ordinary everyday among them, are all relevant for book fairs. They also fit within Bourdieu’s discussion of fields of cultural production with their mechanisms of consecration, and structural homology between creative works, positions, and actual position-taking as participants seek to capitalize on opportunities made available in a specific field (Bourdieu, 1993: 84, 133, 182).

This book is about how those working in the creative industries take into account, negotiate and try to use to their advantage different kinds of values when participating in fairs, festivals and competitive events. It addresses three broad themes that cover the production, exchange and consumption of cultural or creative products. One concerns the nature of creative industries themselves and their production processes; another the role of fairs and festivals as institutions of economic and cultural exchange in the creative industries; and the third the ways in which different fields of cultural production are constituted and evolve through negotiation of the various values that different actors bring to bear on, and that ultimately extend to the consumption of, cultural products.

Creative industries

The – seemingly oxymoronic – notion of a ‘creative industry’ is an amalgam of two older terms that can be traced back to two separate sources. The first is ‘creative arts’, which derived from the philosophy of civic humanism espoused by the Earl of Shaftesbury and Sir Joshua Reynolds in England during the eighteenth century, and which came to be associated with an intellectual ideology of ‘public art’ (Hartley, 2005: 6–7). The second is ‘culture industry’, a term coined in 1947 by two members of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, in their influential book, Dialectic of Enlightenment, to describe the role of media in contemporary society. This phrase was preferred to that of ‘mass culture’ because the authors wished to argue against the then prevalent idea that culture arose spontaneously from the masses themselves. Instead, they suggested that cultural products were carefully tailored for consumption by the masses and were thus manufactured more or less according to plan (Adorno, 1991: 85). For this reason, Adorno later explained, the expression ‘industry’ was not intended to be taken too literally. It did not refer strictly to production processes, but to the standardization of cultural products, as well as to the rationalization of techniques relating to their distribution (Adorno, 1991: 87). Both these terms, in their separate ways, were originally advocated in opposition to the commercial exploitation of creativity.