Early in May, I received a reply from my friend Kah Gay, publisher of Ethos Books in Singapore, to an email I sent en masse a few weeks back. Said email was crafted by Publishers for Palestine (P4P) urging publishers to boycott the Frankfurt Book Fair to pressure Israel and its backers, including Germany and the United States, to comply with international law and end Israel’s genocide in Gaza. As an active member of P4P in Southeast Asia, Gantala Press was asked to send the email to publishers in the region.

KG was the only one to reply out of the fifty or so recipients of the email. He wrote: “Ethos Books will be standing alongside Publishers for Palestine, with Gantala. We just received an invite to be part of the Singapore delegation to Frankfurt Book Fair, and we will not be taking up the invite.”

A win!

Publishers for Palestine organizes publishers, writers, and book makers from around the world to unite in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle for liberation. The progressive International Alliance of Independent Publishers (IAIP), which was looking to expand its membership, found us from among the signatories of the statement released by P4P shortly after October 7, 2023. In September 2024, I spoke about independent publishing in Asia at the IAIP-organized Babelica online book fair with KG and other publishers. The IAIP also invited Gantala Press to join the Alliance and apply to participate at the Literal PRO Radical Book Fair in Barcelona in May 2025, where I spoke alongside P4P, the Palestinian Library and Liberatory Book Fair, and Safarjal Books on publishing and Palestine.

P4P calls for a boycott of the Frankfurt Book Fair beginning in 2025, when the Philippines is incidentally its Guest of Honor (GoH), and until Victory. It is a strategic part of Palestinian activists’ call for the implementation of BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) against institutions that are complicit in apartheid, prolonged military occupation, persecution, and genocide. This call references to the successful global boycott against South Africa which helped end South African apartheid that lasted from 1948 (the same year as the Nakba) to 1994. Contrary to popular thought, the call to boycott the Frankfurt Book Fair is not a random, baseless political action that appeared out of thin air.

However, only a handful of Filipino small presses and individual writers are boycotting the Fair. Senator Loren Legarda, the “project principal” behind the Philippines’ GoH stint, said that the Philippines is not withdrawing its participation in the Fair and that “We are present precisely because we believe in the power of literature as a force for truth, and that it must not fall silent in times of injustice.” Established Filipino writers deem the boycott useless and “counter-productive.” One wrote, “Israel’s barbarism” cannot anyway be “helped by withdrawing our participation from one of the world’s largest (if arguably not freest) exchanges of ideas through books.” Another said in a Facebook post that “it would be a mistake to throw away” the opportunity to gain international recognition “in the name of what basically would be a symbolic gesture.”
In discussions that Gantala Press and other small presses have been organizing about the issue, we always emphasize the capitalistic characteristic of the Fair within which the Philippines’ import-oriented, export-dependent economy thrives. Legarda said, “we see our country being celebrated at the world’s largest book fair as a testament to the tireless efforts invested in promoting our literary and creative spirit.” The Philippines as GoH awarded several grants to foreign publishers to translate Filipino works (most of them written in English) to foreign languages, but there are no grants for local publishers to translate foreign works to Filipino. A survey by the National Book Development Board shows that Filipinos prefer reading books in the vernacular than in English or other foreign languages. Thus, why all this effort and money to, in Legarda’s words, “share the stories of the Filipino people to the world,” when our own readers thirst for more books to read in a language they understand?

Outside of publishing, we also take issue with the fact that the Philippines is one of the biggest buyers of weapons from Israel in Asia. These weapons are used in the government’s counter-insurgency program that has killed thousands of activists and peasant leaders and driven away indigenous peoples, farmers, and fisherfolk from their land to give way to the conversion of these lands and bodies of water to commercial ventures such as dams, energy projects, residential complexes, malls, and others. Israel’s biggest sponsor, the US, has just concluded a massive series of environmentally-destructive military exercises featuring Israeli-made missile systems and tanks in the Philippines as part of its goal to provoke war with China.

On Gantala Press’ fourth year since our establishment in 2015, we also had the privilege of joining the Frankfurt Book Fair through its “program for small publishers from countries with a developing book industry.” I met publishers from Latin America, Africa, and Asia. We had workshops on book cover design and contracts negotiation, and spoke at several panel discussions. As a naive young publisher, it was my first time learning that Frankfurt was primarily a trade fair, where publishers negotiate rights and translation deals and other business concerns, and was not really a public book fair. I had simply thought that the Fair was an opportunity to sell our books to Filipinos in Europe and I went there with that goal in mind. However, I was only able to sell a plant-based recipe book to a Filipino who went to the Fair with his partner; a collection of poems to a young German lady who came with her mother; my friend’s children’s book to a German working-class father who did not have enough Euros with him, so I just gave the book at half the price; and a collection of writings by Filipino migrant workers to a lovely Moroccan woman who had a Filipina nanny. No deals or contracts were made — not that I exerted any efforts to schedule meetings with publishers, which I had also just learned then were supposed to be done months prior.

I was only able to sell the books I brought to Germany a few days later at Hopscotch Reading Room in Berlin, where I spoke on feminist publishing and facilitated a zine-making workshop to a small group of Europeans and Filipinos. Hopscotch sells books on decolonization, from the Global South. We have maintained a good relationship with them, eventually exchanging books to sell in our respective countries. Filipino contacts arranged the talk and workshop at Hopscotch, and an Instagram follower offered to put me up for the night at her home when I went to Berlin. Up to now, she remains one of our biggest supporters.

My experience at Frankfurt in 2019 and our current engagement with the Palestine issue made me realize that publishers do not really need to participate in the Fair to share our stories to the world. Tilted Axis Press, an independent press in the UK, commissioned us to put together a collection of Filipino writings in translation. We were introduced to them not in Frankfurt, but by a friend who was following them on Twitter. Now, they are our partner in a book project on food, climate justice, and sovereignty. Also, we were able to make Alexandra Kollontai’s Bolshevik novel available in Filipino because it and its English translation were already in the public domain and no rights had to be bought. At Literal PRO, I met publishers who said that negotiating rights among independent and progressive publishers is different from the negotiations that occur at Frankfurt. Some authors of independent presses would likely agree, they said, to give out language rights gratis or for a token fee. What matters is to have the books reach as many readers as possible. This is why we may be able to bring a book on Palestine and feminism to the Philippines.

Publishers also do not need to participate in Frankfurt to make money, if their goal is simply to sustain themselves and not really to earn a huge profit. We’re happy to report that despite not joining Frankfurt since that first and only time in 2019, our books have been selling, albeit slowly, both locally and abroad (we do not ship outside the Philippines because shipping costs are prohibitive so Filipinos buy our books with the help of traveling friends and family). Regarding production and sustainability, friends help out by offering their design services at a lower rate, and authors themselves contribute to printing, marketing, and distribution costs.

In fact, joining Frankfurt is expensive for a small press like Gantala. We need to send the organizers free copies of our books since they do not buy the books to feature at the Philippine pavilion, which is there not to sell but only to display the titles. A lot of precious time is required to fill out exhaustive forms for the catalog. As well, publishers interested to join Frankfurt must be registered with the government, which means having to spend a few thousand pesos for permits and certificates. Creators who make books and zines at home and print them at the corner shop are not really encouraged to join.

Our publishing work in the international arena came about not from Frankfurt, but from our own growing network as an activist small press. We met Ethos Books in an independent literary fair in Thailand organized by Tilted Axis Press and Soi Squad, and Ethos now sells one of our books in Singapore for us. We printed P4P’s “Poetry for Palestine” zine in the Philippines and donated the proceeds to Filipino-Palestinians from Gaza. We were able to share about independent publishing in the Philippines at the 2023 Georgetown Literary Festival because a friend from Vietnam had connected us to the organizer.

Especially in recent years, when we have worked a lot with women from marginalized communities — farmers, workers, indigenous groups — and determined who our audience is and what our books are for, I have been thinking more and more about the significance of being a small press, and staying small, in a book industry where all roads lead to Frankfurt. In our Babelica panel discussion, we reflected on what it meant to be independent. As KG said, independent publishers are clear about what they’re independent from, whether it’s the government, or the pressures of capitalism, or hegemonic ideologies. Thus, we need to create sharing economies that can help us continue our work as we struggle with all the limitations brought about by independence. For example, he cited how independent publishers need to refuse feeding big publishers’ content which, through AI, big publishers then profit from.

KG’s reply to my email was like an oasis in the desert of hopelessness and despair that surrounds organizing fellow cultural workers around the Palestinian issue. It is a simple but clear example of when resources are indeed shared and where the collective and not only a handful of individuals benefits. In this case, the resource refers to the belief in the cause and the commitment to stay true to it despite the challenges and the domination of false narratives. I realize more and more that staying small and fiercely resistant to capitalistic aspirations is actually a powerful weapon in this war of stories and ideas where the enemy aims to erase an entire culture and create a world where they and their imperialist supporters reign supreme. In publishing as in any industry, imperialists may find allies, but the small and independent cultural workers, like the Palestinian fighters, find comrades.