Exploring German Bookshops
For a few years I worked in publishing, both in England and in Germany. It was extremely interesting work in both countries, but in Germany sub-editors are paid and treated as professionals: I was able to live on my salary and work in splendid surroundings in a house purpose-built by the publisher. The German book trade still treats books as something more than a commodity, as is demonstrated every year at the Frankfurt and Leipzig Book Fairs. It still has fixed retail prices for books and many more publishers and independent bookshops than in Britain.
Going into a bookshop in Germany is a pleasantly unpredictable experience – they do not all belong to one or two centrally managed chains where one knows the layout and selection in advance. And the bookshop owners are real experts who know their authors well and can recommend intelligently because they themselves have chosen the books, not had them sent from some central purchasing department. And for the customer it is a voyage of discovery. One is expected to have time to browse. Probably the shop will extend over several rooms and levels even in a small town such as Mühlhausen, and there will be chairs to encourage you to spend time choosing as well as plenty of publishers’ leaflets and magazines which review the latest books and suggest further reading.
Bookbinding seems still to be a valued art, too. German hardbacks are beautifully bound, often in linen. They stay open without being forced and nowadays they are printed on acid-free paper, so that the investment is for one’s lifetime or longer. There are about 1200 hand bookbinderies in Germany. Training from apprentice to journeyman takes several years and may even include the traditional journeying from one master to another. Further years are needed to become a master bookbinder.
Seldom have I been in a German sitting-room which has not had at least one wall at least partially lined with books. They are regarded as a status symbol even by those who don’t read much. It is not uncommon to find brand new sitting-room furniture with sham book-spines supplied as an integral part of the glass-fronted wall cupboard. My German teacher colleagues own whole libraries of books and can be overheard in their coffee breaks discussing their latest discoveries. Reading for them is a part of their profession, and not just about their own particular subject. I have visited the homes of many English colleagues where there were no books to be seen, except sometimes hidden away in the bedroom as if they were something to be ashamed of. And even if there are a few books visible one practically never sees old books. And how many antiquarian or second-hand bookshops do you find in English streets?
Now there’s something we miss out on in England! Antiquarian bookshops in Germany are like Aladdin’s caves. They are to books what antique-shops are to furniture, and their owners are a pleasure to talk to. Most sizeable towns have several such bookshops. I remember searching last summer for a book about East Prussia (which is now part of Poland). It was published just after the Second World War and was long since out of print, but it only took a few phone-calls round the antiquarian bookshops in Wiesbaden, where I happened to be, and I was off to a shop in a tall nineteenth-century building in the Bismarckstrasse. I found my book and stayed to explore. The shop occupied several storeys and a cellar. The ceilings were high and there must have been about ten layers of shelves up each wall including the stairways. The cellar had evidently run out of wall-space and so the shelves were arranged around each other like a maze in ever-decreasing rectangles, quite hard to find one’s way out of. The shop was online too and linked to a booksearch site which again was linked to antiquarian bookshops all over the EU and the Czech Republic: Das Zentrale Verzeichnis Antiquarischer Bücher, which also appears in English as ChooseBooks.
German-language publishers often have well designed and very helpful websites that give you plenty of information about their authors, including digital browsing. The following are worth exploring:
Random House (Random House-Bertelsmann Group of over 30 publishers)
Aufbau Verlag, the former eminent East German publishing house one of whose eminent authors is Viktor Klemperer
Hoffmann und Campe, one of the oldest, started, like many, as a bookshop in 1781
Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, a paperback publisher with a huge list of authors
and two excellent Swiss publishers
Diogenes publishing purely fiction with an impressive collection of authors, among others Bernhard Schlink, Donna Leon, Scott Fitzgerald and Friedrich Dürrenmatt
Faksimile, the wonderful Swiss publisher of facsimile editions including mediaeval manuscripts such as the Irish Book of Kells from the early ninth century or the earliest Swiss illustrated chronicle, Tschachtlans Bilderchronik, from the fifteenth century.
