A Very Special Year Read Free Page B

greatest optimists (which of course we do), in the world of small bookshops, Ringelnatz & Co. was really one of the smallest. A ground-level shop floor, its longer side faced the street, promoted by its large display window, divided in the middle by a glass door. Inside, floor-to-ceiling shelves were on both sides and at the back on the left, all tightly packed with books; at the back on the right a small staircase with two steps led up to the galley kitchen and two narrow doors – one to the lavatory, the other to the backyard, where any sort of social interaction had ceased long ago. All of this in barely fifty square metres.
    In spite of the limited space, the old bookseller had managed to house an incredibly broad range of reading matter! Admittedly, there was no room for the books to show themselves off; customers were able to see the front covers of only a few. And yet, any passionate reader would find it hard to believe that they might fail to find the book of their choice in this treasury of literature. No lover of romantic tales, no reader of history books, no connoisseur of poetry… especially poetry! Valerie soon establishedthat Aunt Charlotte must have had a weakness for poetry; it was very well represented among both the contemporary and antiquarian books. Whether it was the strictly rhyming and sometimes awkward verse of Andreas Gryphius or the nimble yet profound
Lieder
of Heinrich Heine, the elegiac sensuality of Rilke, the brutal honesty of Trakl or the far-sighted dedication of Neruda – nothing was missing. Modern, comic, earthy. But there was a notable accent on humour, something for which the elderly bookseller seemed to be particularly fond.
    After the Italo Calvino novel and two volumes of Robert Gernhardt, Valerie actually felt better! Literature as therapy? She’d never have subscribed to that. And yet, when two days later the young woman felt chirpy again and no longer found it a struggle to brace herself for the task in hand, she sensed that her small flights into realms of wit had helped her overcome her infection.

FOUR
    T his may come as a surprise, but every now and then what appears self-evident is the last thing you notice. Valerie had spent more than two whole days in the old bookshop when it finally dawned on her that there was a void, something missing there which was urgently required. All of a sudden it was so obvious that she almost let out a quiet scream when she discovered it. Or rather didn’t discover it. But then a number of things that had been veiled in a mild haze became crystal clear. With no computer there was no sensible system of stock control. And with no sensible system of stock control there was no sensible system at all – indeed, one would almost be forced to concede that there was no system whatsoever.
    Except that this was not completely true. For Aunt Charlotte had certainly had a system. Only it was going to take Valerie more than just two days to get her head around the system in its entirety. Until that point, she would find herself shunted back into a pre-digital era, which in her case – she did belong, after all, to the generation of so-called digital natives – could have also been called an antenatal era. At any rate, faced with this state of affairs she felt helpless.
    She turned around and looked down from the small office into the shop. And there they stood. Thousands of them, without a single folder or file that might have given them some order, that might have sorted, managed, tamed them. They stood there, gazing back, and Valerie fancied she could almost feel them making fun of her. Books. Mountains of books. How had the old lady known what she had in stock? Or what she needed to order? Or whether it had already been ordered? Or whether it was still available or out of print? ‘My God,’ Valerie whispered, as she went down the two steps into the shop to wander along the shelves again and look once more at all the