My trip to the Leipzig book fair (March 2026)

Photo by Patrick Baum at Unsplash

I am noticing that after my last post “spring is coming” I felt into a trap. My classical negativity trap. I was pretty down struggled with fighting back. One of the related events was my day at the Leipzig book fair, where I also met with an online friend for the first ime. I was prepared for the crowds and everything. But other than my old me I barely had a plan. I wasn´t much interested in a special author or buying certain books. I just felt to urge to there on a leap of faith in January. It took me almost 3h one way to get there from doorway-to-dooraway, as I live in another city.

Being there for the first time in about 10 years felt wild. A lot of nostalgia came up, as it was my forth time there. The first time I was at that book fair was with school, when I was like 15 or 16, now I´m 35. The little crowded manga corner from back then has become a mayor part of the fair with seperate entrances. It was full on tons of levels. But I was surprised how well as these people were directed. It was barely that you were stuck within the halls. I arrived there like 30 mins after the opening and just waited 15ish mins to get into the building, despite several queus of 200m with 5 to 10 people per row.

Inside I needed a bit time to adjust myself and had these “Why am I here?” moments. I forced myself not to overthink it and just went wherever my curiosity lead me. I didn´t check out the big book sellers until later in the day, when the majority of the crowds were gone.

As a shy person it took a bit of courage to meet up with an online friend and strolling through the halls a bit. We ended up having a nice lunch together and nerding a bit about Game of Thrones. I was positively surprised that her sense of direction as a bad as mine 🤣. After almost three hours together each went our own way again. I was strolling through the Manga Comic Con halls, bought a few things. And won a plushie at a plushie stall ❤️. It was the first time I won something at such an event, so it ment a lot to me. I got a few small things like notebooks, a T-Shirt, some stickers etc, which I adore.

In the afternoon I was just sitting outside and watch endless cossplayers doing their photoshoots. At some cases I was amazed about the amount of detail of their outfit. Sometimes it felt like there were as much cosplayers as (hobby) photographers there. The whole pond of the fair area felt like an open air photo studio, as it was cold but sunny. It was a much needed coffee break.

After a bit of window shopping for my Kindle (aka: taking photos of books I want to buy as ebooks) I left the fair shortly before the official end of 6 pm. But I still had 2 spare hours 20 min travel distance to catch my bus back home. So I set there and did some voice-to-text “journaling” and ate snacks I had with me next to the big fountain. I was very exhausted, as I got up at 5:30 am. Having a big thermos cap with a coffee — alternative with me saved my day.

Only very nerve-wrecking part of the day was getting from the fair back to the main station through the crowds. It´s just a 5 min walk and 5–10 min ride by train. As I had been mentally prepared for this for the whole fair, I tried to take it lightly. When I was out of the train and saw that my bus is on time I felt relieved and calm, strolling through a few stores in the mall next to the bus stop.

On the way back I had a sudden burst of ideas, which I jotted down in my phone. I spend like 1h dumping ideas related to a PKM — mindset, PKM — traps blog post series (or a book?) and was a bit angry about myself that I didn´t took my Ipad with me. Back in my hometown I was lucky that we arrived a bit earlier.

The most painfull thing of the day were the stairs back into the apartment on the third floor. On that day I had at least 3x as much steps as usual, most likely even more. I felt like I haven´t had a shower in a whole week. But I felt a strange sense of relieve and belonging anyway. I was relieved that I was back home, with my partner, at the place I know. But I also felt like that daytrip alone was healing in many ways. It took me a few days to realize that one reason that it felt to so good was that I went there alone. My friend directly said that she wanted to spend just a few hours with me, and it was totally fine. As I felt a bit lost in thought there and just needed to be alone with myself. I needed that feeling of being content with myself and realized that a lot of my mental struggles are reasoned in my focus of non-fiction reading + listening almost entirely, sometimes for months.

The next day I got like 5 of the books from the fair as ebooks. Like 11 or 12€ in total. I was surprised againg that ebooks in my native language (German) are sometimes as expensive as the softcover versions of paper books. On rare occassions even more expensive. That idea blew my mind. It´s the reason why many bookies are reading more books in English these days: most of the time they are simply cheaper. It´s normal that there are differences of 5€+ between these languages for the Kindle version. Sometimes German books have English titles anyway. Sometimes the titles are translated wrong, which makes me cringe. I bought one of these books with a cringe title as gift for my mom anyway, as reading in English is challenging for her.

So the trip wasn´t really “productive” at all. It was unplanned, a bit messy, but that made the fun for me. The reconnection with my younger self, the noticing that I still enjoy books and a lot of small details encouraged me to diversify my reading and tweak some things in my everyday life.