One of the big weeks of the publishing year is looming, with the London Book Fair now only moments away. Come mid-April, the great and the good of the global book world will be finding their way to their stands, getting excited, getting lost, having so many meetings that they can neither talk nor see, recovering by drinking so much they can no longer see or talk, and then doing it all again the next day. Along the way, some deals might be done.

The big question of this year’s LBF will be whether the Penguin Random House stand is so large that it can create its own gravity, causing the lesser stands (that is, every other stand) to slowly orbit it before collapsing in on themselves in a giant publishing black hole. Our educated guess is that this should happen sometime around Wednesday afternoon.