Today with Holger Schwab, owner of buchLaden46 in beautiful Bonn.
Holger, please describe the final few meters of the route you take in the mornings to your bookshop:
Over the last few meters to buchLaden 46, it becomes obvious to me that, after all, I work in a city and there are many more people around now: I have to concentrate on the traffic and the first jobs of the day.
It takes my mind away from what my route was like just a little earlier: I follow a rather round-about trail that lets me cycle along roads relatively free of cars for most of the way. Along the river, across the dyke and then along this field.
While I cycle, plenty of ideas for my day at work occur to me, maybe plans for readings or thoughts about books and the people I’m about to meet. Here’s a lovely picture from my way to work. I often take a break and stop to gaze on the views.
Throughout the day...
When the shop-door opens and someone steps inside ...
I’m especially pleased that so many young people have recently been coming back to the shop. I’m thrilled by the questions they ask as they’re looking for books. They are often amazingly educated and have wide interests. They might well inspire you to open a book you have not yet come across.
What wonderful thing is it that happens when we read?
As a reader, I’m offered every opportunity to travel world-wide and make discoveries! The journey can take me into the past or into the future, or to other countries. I can have encounters with other people and share their journeys! And I always hope to find a book that will help me become a better person.
Many people say they don’t have the time to read. What can they do about it?
Switch off the electricity!
Has a Norwegian book given you a reading experience that you remember with pleasure?
Yes, definitely! At the first reading I arranged in buchLaden 46 together with my friend Thomas Fechner-Smarsly, we presented books from Norway. Books by Kjartan Fløgstad, Cecilie Løveid and Edvard Hoem had just come out and they had also been published in German translation. Thomas introduced the books, I was to read the extracts. Nothing but erotic ‘passages’, which rather embarrassed me...
And I remember well how sceptical I had been about Karl Ove Knausgård and his literary project My Struggle [Min Kamp], when he came to the bookshop for a reading in 2010. What about all that autobiographical writing? What would it amount to? After that evening, he had won me over. But I’m not sure that would have been the outcome if I hadn’t met him face-to-face!
Translated from the German by Anna Paterson
Visit BuchLaden46's website here.
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