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BEING a novelist is obviously a pretty solitary activity.

If you are a writer, then you are, in Martin Amis’s words, “most fully alive when you are alone”.

Part of the deal is also that you don’t really have any work outings or work parties or conventions or any of the kind of things many people in regular employment take for granted.

Well, there is one exception on the convention front – the Frankfurt Book Fair, where I found myself last week.

It is the biggest book fair in the world. How big? Well, imagine six halls the size of Glasgow airport bolted together and you’ll be getting close.

They are all filled with books. There are cook books of every conceivable type. There are whole areas the size of supermarkets just devoted to car manuals. Or travel guides. Or guides to raising your pets in the happiest possible environment.

There are stalls filled with the most populist Mills and Boon-type romantic novels you can imagine and tiny stalls featuring the most specialised books in the world. Say, for instance, a vegetarian diet book aimed at the single Eskimo hermaphrodite.

Frankfurt is where all the biggest agents, publishers and writers in the world come together to try to do the biggest deal. It is here that new books are bought and sold in a frenzy of deal making.

The deal making spills over into the evenings in all the hotels and bars of Frankfurt as expense accounts are drained into the early hours of the mornings.

Many of Frankfurt’s old hands are often partying until four or five in the morning and are back at their stands in the huge halls at nine.

After three or four days of this, you start to see some pretty impressive faces wandering around underneath the fluorescent lights. It’s kind of like an office party that goes on for a week.

For a writer, two things are immediately apparent. One, wandering around through all the wheeling-dealing, you begin to feel a bit like a cow taking a walk around the slaughterhouse to see how it all works.

And, two, unless you are JK Rowling or Steven King, you immediately get a sense of your terrifyingly microscopic place in the universe of books.

Because there are something like 7000 sellers from more than 100 countries with around half a million new books to sell. Some of these books are, frankly, so utterly mental that one wonders if they can hope to shift a single copy.

To celebrate this lunacy, the book fair holds a competition to find the book with the craziest, most obscure title of the year.

I really liked the 1996 winner Greek Rural Postmen and Their Cancellation Numbers.

And who can forget, from 1984, The Book of Marmalade: Its Antecedents, Its History, and Its Role in the World Today.

But my favourite has to be 2008’s The 2009-2014 World Outlook for 60-milligram Containers of Fromage Frais. Now that’s what I call niche.