good bookstore

Every time I use the Dammtor station when I return to Hamburg by train, I walk over the Dag Hammerskjöld Bridge to the Stephansplatz U-Bahn station. There are entrances to this stop quite a distance away, near the Casino and the Opera, but I always turn right off the bridge and enter into the closest passageway. I descend by a few steps to get to the entrance, and before I take the escalator down underground, there is a little used bookshop waiting there to greet me - an Antiquariat. I have always wanted to go in, but have resisted, thinking that what they sold was too expensive, but today I did. Standing in glass cases where you would expect the usual subway advertisements was a series of books that seemed more interesting than the next - a collection of early graphic work by Georg Grosz, a first edition of a collection of poems by Gottfried Benn, Thomas Mann's diaries, Benjamin's Arcades Project, Upton Sinclair editions with the original covers designed by John Heartfield - and they were all under 30 euro. I walked in.

Of the 17 books I seriously thumbed, 6 were "necessary," and, in the end, I only bought one. I am trying to use libraries even more than I already do, but as I leafed through the Berlin-Paris exhibition catalogue from the Pompidou or a huge monograph on John Heartfield, or even the Marlborough Gallery catalogue of Kurt Schwitters in Exile, I knew that I would one day regret not buying them when I could but that, in the more immediate future, I would regret shipping them back to the States when the time came even more. As for Ilja Ehrenburg's autobiography or Döblin's four-volume paean to the November Revolution of 1918, those were even sadder to let go because they were knocked out the first round, being more for pleasure than "necessity."

Fundgrube fuer Buecherfruende
Dammtordamm 4
20354 Hamburg
+49 (0)40 34 50 16