It’s been a busy few weeks in the translation rights department here in the European office. We’re in the thick of preparation for Frankfurt Book Fair which will be held from October 12-16 in the eponymous city. As PUP’s new rights manager, this will be my first visit to FBF, but I’ll certainly be kept busy. I have a full schedule of appointments with our team of rights agents as well as publishers and editors from a truly international array of publishing houses: we have almost sixty meetings in total over the course of the fair. For those of you attending the fair, why not visit our stand in hall 8? I’ll be pitching some of the key titles from our forthcoming spring 2012 list (keep an eye on the website for our exciting new titles, which will be launched soon!) to international publishers considering the books for translation.

So, what else is new in the rights world? We were delighted to see the publication of the French edition of John R. Bowen’s
Can Islam Be French? Pluralism and Pragmatism in a Secularist State published by Steinkis Editions on the shelves at the recent launch of the book – and in very prestigious company too.

We’ve also agreed an interesting selection of translation deals in the last few weeks. Diane Coyle’s The Economics of Enough will be published in Italian translation by Edizione Ambiente in future, and we’ll be keen to see what Daniel Drezner’s Theories of International Politics and Zombies looks like in Japanese translation when it is published by Hakusuisha. The most exciting deal of the last few weeks, however, was for a PUP book first published in the 1950s. George Polya’s How to Solve It: A New Aspect of Mathematical Method has been in print in Japan since the 1950s and has sold over 36,000 copies in Maruzen’s Japanese edition since 2001. We’ve just renewed the deal with Maruzen, and here’s hoping that the book continues as a perennial bestseller for them as well as PUP.

- Kimberley M. Williams, International Rights Manager