And so we finally drag ourselves back to civilisation from the wilds of East London and the waiting room to Hell that is the ExCeL centre (irrelevant capitalisation venue’s own), home to this year’s London Book Fair.

It was the first time the LBF has been held in the East, after many years at the increasingly cramped (but comfortingly distant from Canning Town) Olympia. The DLR had never heard such literate cursing. The final jewel in the joyless crown was the twinning of the august LBF with the world’s largest massage parlour, the Professional Beauty show in the adjacent hall. This led to the amusing sight of the well-heeled mavens and moguls of international publishing scrumming with teenage trainee hairdressers from Catford in the skinny latte queue.

Most notably, there was damn near cock-all in the way of internet access, leaving this reporter the stark choice between no blogging for three days, or entering lengthy reports in a stand-up booth with a wall-mounted keyboard and no command button. Hence the silence.

Such technophobia is a bit weird for somewhere as glassy and steely as ExHell, but it’s par for the course for the book industry. On Sunday (for shame) STML attended a seminar on “Online Book Coverage” hosted by John Vacaro, online manager of Publisher’s Weekly, with a panel consisting on Michael Cader of Publisher’s Lunch, Bethanne Patrick of AOL Books (who has her own blog), and Paul Carr of The Friday Project (ditto). The erudition of the guests was not matched by that of their audience – the panellists were forced to spend most of the session explaining to the room what a blog was, and that, shockingly, the internet could be used to promote books. Publishing Industry, meet the Twenty-First Century; Twenty-First Century… Oh dear. Publishing’s fallen asleep again.

Nevertheless, there was some interest to be had in other areas, and we’ll get onto them as soon as we’ve pissed three days worth of the caffeine out of our system and read a few of the really promising Lithuanian novels we picked up. And the new Taschen catalogue, of course.