At Paris’ Les Forges de Vulcain, David Meulemans likes to buy an international text prior to its translation, to work on the editing.

By Eric Dupuy | @duperico

‘We’re Really an Author-Focused House’

David Meulemans arrived at Frankfurter Buchmesse with an ambitious editorial experiment.

His independent French publishing house, Éditions Les Forges de Vulcain, is presenting Doppelganger, a novel that challenges traditional translation-rights models. It positions smaller publishers as cultural innovators on the international stage.

The project exemplifies Meulemans’ conviction that independent houses can create significant cultural impact through careful editorial work and international vision. Written originally in Spanish by the Catalan playwright Gerard Guix, Doppelganger underwent an intensive two-year editing process that reduced the manuscript by nearly a third.

“Usually, when we publish foreign literature,” Meulemans says, “we buy a foreign title and translate it after it’s already been exploited in another territory. Here, the idea was to buy a foreign text before it was even exploited, in order to work on the editing.”

The collaborative editing involved Guix, the French translator Carole Fillières, and a Colombian editor, Alejandro Ferrer. This approach allowed Les Forges de Vulcain to demonstrate French publishing’s editorial expertise while creating what Meulemans terms “a text designed to be European.”

Doppelganger addresses the end of World War II and contemporary far-right resurgence—themes with particular resonance across Europe. The novel combines rigorous documentation with operatic structure, reflecting Guix’s background as Catalonia’s leading contemporary playwright and winner of the 2024 prize for best Catalan play.

Already longlisted for France’s 2025 Médicis Prize for foreign literature, Doppelganger has generated substantial international interest ahead of Frankfurt. The book is being marketed in Spanish rather than French, reflecting growing international demand for Spanish-language content.

“I’ve realized something rather sad, Meulemans says: “We have more and more foreign publishers who speak Spanish better than French.”  He cites recent experience at the Prague Book Fair where Spanish versions of texts generated more interest than French editions.

Fifteen Years of Frankfurt Strategy

Meulemans this year attended his 15th consecutive Frankfurt, an unusual trajectory for an independent French publisher. Unlike many French houses that view Frankfurt as a distant objective, Les Forges de Vulcain prioritized international presence from its 2010 founding.

“From the very beginning, Frankfurt was important,” says Meulemans, whose international outlook stems partly from his Italian mother and American family connections, plus two years of study in ads United States.

His Frankfurt approach combines systematic meetings with comprehensive “market reconnaissance.” While agent Milena Ascione, who has represented the house since 2018, maintains packed schedules with half-hour appointments, Meulemans dedicates significant time to floor visits.

“I always force myself to take half a day, even a full day, to visit all the stands,” he says. “I haunt Frankfurt, going to stands one-by-one. This strategy serves three purposes: acquiring rights, selling titles, and conducting intelligence on trends in marketing, events, and new technologies.”

Since 2023, two Les Forges de Vulcain editors have attended Frankfurt, including Ferrer, whose presence has opened Spanish-language markets for both acquisitions and sales.

Independent Model with Strategic Partnerships

Les Forges de Vulcain operates with a three-person core team plus seven regular collaborators. The house publishes approximately 10 titles annually, alternating between French and translated works across general and genre literature.

“We’re really an author-focused house,” Meulemans says. “When an author joins our catalogue, it’s for their entire body of work, with a strong commitment to defend and support them over the next 40 years.”

Growth has been driven by French authors like Gilles Marchand, whose novels consistently achieve bestseller status, and international writers including Rivers Solomon and the 2020 US National Book Award fiction category winner, Charles Yu (Interior Chinatown).

For titles requiring substantial marketing investment, Les Forges de Vulcain partners with Media-Participations, France’s third-largest publishing group, through co-edition agreements.

“Each party invests money in the title and shares the profits,” Meulemans says. He values Media-Participations as “the first French group to really think about other media—cinema, audiovisual, video games—and to work extensively internationally, whether in Korea, Japan, or the United States.”

Shifting International Markets

A decade and a half of Frankfurt attendance gives Meulemans perspective on evolving global publishing patterns. He expresses concern about American market insularity.

“I really have the impression that the United States has become a nation-state like any other,” he says. “They’ve somewhat renounced a universal vocation that they might have had in the past.” American market penetration has become increasingly difficult, even among publishers positioning themselves as liberal and internationally minded — “what was previously the domain of the American right, not at all of liberals,” he says.

Conversely, he says, emerging markets show promise. Countries across the former Yugoslavia have developed a robust publishing infrastructure—”what we in France call a book chain—a functional book market.”

Korea represents a standout success. “What I find quite fantastic is Korea’s rise,” Meulemans says, crediting a 25-year investment in cultural diplomacy. Korean success spans literature, manhwa (Korean manga), and webtoons, supported by government programs including publisher invitations to Seoul International Book Fair.

“They understood that long-term success requires investment in cultural diplomacy,” he says, contrasting this with American cultural disinvestment.

French Market Assessment

Despite widespread industry anxiety, Meulemans maintains his optimism based on his house’s performance. “The paradox is that I meet many anxious people,” he says, “while everything is going very well for Les Forges. We have good economic results, people love our books, we win prizes.”

However, structural challenges exist. Fiction sales have declined, particularly among the traditional core readership of 45- to 65-year-olds. “We always blame young people, but actually, young people still read a lot,” he says, “just differently. Conversely, I find that 45- to 65-year-olds are struggling somewhat.”

Recent bookstore closures may reflect a post-COVID market correction rather than fundamental decline. “Maybe we’re just in a rectification period that creates anxiety because we see bookstores closing, but actually we might return to a market comparable to 2019,” Meulemans says. His strategy involves diversification across cultural industries—comics, audiovisual, video games, board games—creating mutual support systems when individual sectors face difficulties.

Doppelganger embodies broader themes about cultural transmission that drive Meulemans’ publishing philosophy. “We’re a particular generation because we knew people who lived through World War II. Our children won’t know anyone who experienced World War II,” he says.

This generational shift from memory to transmission, he says, makes projects addressing fascism’s dangers essential. “At each generation, we’ll need to produce novels like this to state obvious truths—that Nazism is evil—but it’s an obvious truth we must hear because maybe that’s what, especially in the cultural world, will save culture.”

The stakes remain high: “Generally, culture is very high on fascists’ lists of what needs to be destroyed.”

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