In case you haven’t already seen it, the latest Harper’s cover story (subscription only) is a candid, fly-on-the-wall account of the Frankfurt Book Fair, notable for journalist Gideon Lewis-Kraus’s florid portraits of industry heavyweights (notorious super-agent Andrew Wylie, for example, is described as a moisteurized fist of virile elegance, which sounds just about right). Here, Lewis-Kraus answers questions about his Frankfurt experience. Will he return to the fair in future years? Ideally, I won’t be going back to Frankfurt at all anytime soon, he says. [I]t’s a pretty dispiriting place.

Elsewhere, in the London Review of Books, Colin Robinson gives an insiders’ account of Black Wednesday (Robinson was one of 35 staffers laid off from Simon & Schuster in December). The piece gives a competent overview of the crisis, and though his pessimism about the future of the industry is understandable, his reactionary rejection of new technology is disheartening. Robinson’s attitude to the digital age (The problems presented for the book trade by the internet come in a variety of forms) sounds a decade out of date.