Billy Wilder on Assignment by Noah Isenberg (top 100 novels of all time TXT) 📕

carried in a little cardboard suitcase, consisted of “thdee departbets,” as he, condemned to a lifetime of sniffling, would say to his customers through his stuffed nose. These three departments were: on the left, “cribidal dovels,” in the middle, “polidics,” and on the right, “cdassics.” Except for a battered volume of Peter Altenberg, missing pages 8 to 26, which he was never able to get rid of, his collection changed its look every few weeks. His business was going well. Suddenly we learn that he has shot himself to death—and that he did so out of desperation.

I cannot believe it. Recently I happen to have been spending a good deal of time in bookstores because I was interested in seeing people buy and sell books, but mainly to find out whether books are being bought at all. I watched carefully and sounded out the gentlemen there. Business is good. Of course, it has dropped a bit since Christmas. The important thing, however, is this: in Berlin, and, I may generalize, in Germany, many books are being bought at this very time. There is good reason for satisfaction.

So if my acquaintance has shot himself, it is unlikely that the cause was that no one is buying books. It is quite certain that hunger was not the reason he shot himself. But rather … we did all warn him about Amélie; we can’t be held responsible.

One afternoon, in one of those splendid bookstores in the western part of Berlin that smells better than Coty and Chanel and features a charming disharmony of colorful book covers almost as pleasant to look at as women with ingeniously applied makeup, one lady is there who is interested in American literature. She has a younger brother in Kansas, a pastor, and wants to go see him. The salesman has to listen to this, has to lend his ear to detailed family stories before finally pawning off a paperback edition of Egon Erwin Kisch’s Paradise America. A young married couple decides on a book by Siegfried von Vegesack, Love Non-Stop. The two volumes of The Battle for Rome, by the revered Felix Dahn, are being dusted off; a papa takes them. A hopeful boy is likely to be celebrating his twelfth birthday nearby tomorrow. A man who doesn’t look the least bit professorial still insists on the new Propyläen History of the World, which carries the fresh scent of high-quality art printing.

A conversation starts up with a gentleman who sells books here. What takes off, what doesn’t? What collects mildew on the shelves, and what gets ripped out of your hands like rolls right out of the oven? How do you give advice to a customer, how do you get the customer to add on a second and third book? And so forth.

Today’s purchasers, particularly the superior ones, have a very fine nose for good books, the gentleman behind the desk says. Customers grow interested in publishing houses, which make them think that the book must be high quality, aha, S. Fischer, that won’t be garbage! They gather advice from the newspaper reviews. Every now and again they also take to heart endorsements by important contemporaries found on the books’ jackets, if these endorsements don’t overtly smack of advertising. They stop ignoring the displays and have nothing against getting catalogs of new publications sent to their homes.

The price of the book isn’t the most important thing at all. In France, people flock to cheap books even if they’re printed on paper so thick and hard that you can use a page from one of them to kill somebody. Or they’re printed on toilet paper. They don’t care. As long as it’s cheap, cheap, cheap. Germans buy a book with the same seriousness used to buy something like a shirt. Durability is key. They have no intention of leaving the book on the train or throwing it into the corner like yesterday’s newspaper. It has to have “lasting value.” A piece of furniture. And a magnificent one at that. In Germany, they make far more tasteful books than, say, shirts. Just compare the display window of a bookstore with that of a shop selling woolens.

Trotsky’s memoirs, Stefan Zweig’s Fouché, Alfred Döblin’s Alexanderplatz are the books of the day.

During my half-hour of observations, three copies of the Trotsky sell, one of Fouché, and a full four of Döblin’s Alexanderplatz. The afternoon mail, which is just drifting in, brings letters with two more orders for Döblin’s Berlin book, one from Munich and one from Riga. Memoirs, biographies are popular. Rudolf Olden’s Stresemann, Hans von Seeck’s Future of the Empire, René Fülöp-Miller’s Jesuits are doing splendidly. Right behind Döblin in the category of novels is the new Leonhard Frank, Brother and Sister. Sarah Levy’s O mon Goye! is also in high demand, surely in large part because of its cheeky title. In the historical documents, Theodor Pilvier’s The Kaiser’s Coolies and Werner Beumelburg’s Barrage around Germany are off to an excellent start. The latest Jack London, The Valley of the Moon, can’t complain, Hans Rudolf Berndorff’s Espionage is approaching forty thousand copies sold.

There is some slight stagnation in crime stories. The success of extravagant mass productions has become quite iffy.

By contrast, illustrated animal books are selling wonderfully since Paul Eipper’s Animals Look at You! Bengt Berg, for example. And the beautiful travel books. Günther Plüschow. Wilhelm Filchner.

That, in short, is the situation that can be surveyed on an afternoon in a Berlin bookstore.

But as far as “saddling” customers with a book, the gentlemen here will have no part of that. We don’t force anything on the customers. Not us. We advise them. We shyly present books that might interest them. We let them leaf through the books as long as they like. We don’t forget to point a customer who has bought some Erich Maria Remarque to Ludwig Renn, and to Georg Glaser. But we don’t saddle them with anything. If the shop looks appealing they’ll take something else