11th March 2025
Bent’s notes Horace Bent @horacebent
Horace hopes to strike a chord at this LBF
The Bookseller's diarist is looking forward to some spruced stands, though seems to have lost his way on the road to the National Portrait Gallery
W
elcome, Olympians! I trust you are arriving at this LBF with a spring in your step as joyous as Serena’s at the Super Bowl half- time show, Crip Walking over Drake’s metaphorical grave. As in the past few
years, you’ll find the venue still amid its La Sagrada Família- esque never-to-be finished reno. I suspect that at LBF 2125, Reed Exhibitions will still be saying sorry for the building works (undoubtedly there will be no apologies for the inevi- table price hikes) and explaining that the “mild inconven- ience” of space restrictions means half the International Rights Centre has to be in Olympia, the other half in the basement of Bethnal Green Working Men’s Club (a mere 55 minutes away via a brisk walk and the Central Line, so 30-minute back-to-backs should be easily squeezed in). But I gather, if my reading of various breathy interiors
mags pieces in the run-up to LBF is correct, plans are afoot among exhibitors to spruce things up to combat the build- ing-site dreariness. I believe the Madeleine Milburn Agency’s IRC tables will allow foreign commissioning editors to soak in a gold Aequs bath from William Holland or loll on a Gaston y Daniela Lecco Rojo sofa. This, darlings, is how the six- and seven-figure deals come rolling in. And while Fitzcarraldo won’t have a stand of its own,
I’m told founder Jacques Testard has sent LBF organisers some notes for rejigging the English PEN Literary Salon for his panel discussion on Thursday, with demands for a mid-century aesthetic that should strike the perfect balance between playful and sophisticated – think Le Corbusier, Charlotte Perriand and Eileen Grey – with a Walter Gropius/ Bauhaus-inspired colour palette of emerald green combined with paler shades of pink and blue. Anyway, to the usual pre-LBF openers, starting with the
WME “let’s wrap this up sharp-ish by 7pm so everyone, us included, can scarper over to HarperCollins” party. All very convivial, though the shy, retiring WME-ers from Manhattan and Tinsel Town were barely heard above the hubbub. And then to HarperCollins and a very strange night. I was headed over to the National Portrait Gallery when Fiona Allen herself spied me and said: “Oh, no, Horace, we’ve put on a shuttle bus just for you.” I clambered in and a mere eight hours later was in the new venue, a glittering Shangri-La called Robroyston. “Oh my sweet Jesus,” I whispered to myself, cowed by the two million square feet of sheer magnificence, “is that state-of-the-art KNAPP logistics automation and new machines from Jungheinrich? I can die a happy man.” But odd, none of the usual folk from the HC hootenanny
Olympia continues its La Sagrada Família-esque never-to-be finished renovation 18
were there: no agents holding forth with unnerving certainty on what AI is going to do to us, no commissioners opining that the writer of The Bookseller’s editors’ ranking should be tried in The Hague. But I had a grand old time, hanging out with the lads there, and feeling pretty jolly following some cullen skink and several tins of Tennent’s Heavy, I decided to pitch in with the biggest task at hand, processing the many David Walliams returns. I may be some time.
London Book Fair Comment
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