A Very Special Year Read Online Free PDF

resting. Sven took a deep breath, turned the light back on and got up.
    â€˜Great curtain,’ he said in a slightly hoarse voice, undoing the cord that tied back the large stage curtain behind the shop window. ‘And a great chair.’
    â€˜Reading chair,’ Valerie specified.
    â€˜Let’s do some studying then.’
    What a marvellous invention stage curtains are. Devised to hide the banal and whet our appetite for the extraordinary. They create the space for ourimagination by eliminating the external perspective. Stage curtains embed our attention in the necessary mixture of mystery and anticipation. In a sense one could argue that there is a performance on either side of the stage curtain in Ringelnatz & Co. The main characters introduce themselves in the proscenium – selected titles which, thanks to their topicality, their particularly charming features or because the elderly bookseller held them in great esteem, are like lighthouses attracting the curiosity of passers-by. To the rear of the stage, the entire mass of players, utterly inconceivable in their diversity, so overwhelming that each one of them can become for the spectator the lead protagonist. Each book an event, turned into a theatrical production solely thanks to this heavy, deep-red curtain with its golden tassled edging, as old-fashioned as it is voluptuous, which was not pulled back again until the following morning to free up the view to an interested observer: Valerie, who until now hadn’t given it a glance. She stood inside the small bookshop, somewhat dishevelled from a largely sleep-deprived night full of various
Kamasutra
-related studies, but pleasantly exhausted, and she realized to her astonishment that this most important PR tool for Ringelnatz & Co. had till now completely escaped her attention.
    Well, over the course of the day she would subject the books to careful scrutiny. To start with she pulled out a handful and, obeying a spontaneous hunch, put the
Kamasutra
in one of the spaces that had become free. Then she left the shop with her boyfriend to get something to eat finally.

FIVE
    A cabinet of fantasies, a source of knowledge, a collection of lore from past and present, a place to dream… A bookshop can be so many things. Of course, on a very banal level it is also a store of printed matter to be sold to customers. But anyone who engages with the diversity a bookshop offers can experience epiphanies of a quite different and exceptionally sensual nature!
    It was a well-thumbed little book, wrapped in grey-black paper, one of those works so easy to overlook in a superficial review of the stock. Most of the gold embossing on the spine had disappeared due to a tear in the binding. Valerie didn’t examine it closely; she just pulled out the book to note down the authorand title. Both were set between two small stars, also embossed in gold, on a very beautiful oxblood vignette on the front cover: Gustav Flaubert,
Memoirs of a Madman
. And while she wondered why this name hadn’t been written with an ‘e’ – Gustave Flaubert – she opened the book and discovered that inside, that’s to say on the title page, it had been printed in two colours: red and black on white. In the bottom right-hand corner on this first page (something seemed to be missing; maybe the book had once had a frontispiece) was an illegible name and a year: ‘39’. As a note on the very last page said, this edition had appeared in 1922. The book smelled faintly of printer’s ink and pipe smoke. How many hands might this have passed through before ending up amongst the antiquarian books in the shop? And who had brought it here?
    The text was sharply printed and – as Valerie noted when she ran her fingers across the pages – slightly debossed. On those pages with only a few lines of text, the imprint of the type on the reverse side was clearly visible. At the bottom of page 17 there was a tiny