Read A Very Special Year for Free Online

blend from the interplay of countless aromas as a bookshop, in which old and new works were arranged with love. As
The Daynight Lamp
proved, if for a moment you can stop regarding a book as purely a means of conveying ideas, it is an utterly sensual experience – a work of total art.
    It’s not particularly difficult to run a bookshop successfully, Valerie thought. You need the most basic principles of management, a sensible business plan, a little negotiating skill, a few contacts and a large helping of magic. Of course, not everyone who sails through time and space with a bookshop can master the last of these. Nor could Valerie. She didn’t even come close, she would soon realize. For you could check, correct, predict all the figures; you could count, order and make an inventory of all the books. You could work from early in the morning to late in the evening and even at night. But if you couldn’t perform magic then all this was in vain. It felt as if there must be a million books available. Perhaps there were many more than this. Different titles! Andseveral editions of many of these. Who could ever know what from all this material would really interest the reader? Who could even begin to make a selection from this inconceivable mass of books that had accumulated over hundreds of years? Didn’t managing a product range mean that you had to know everything to be able to sift out what you could recommend to your readers? But perhaps the bookshop itself was a work, too: an anthology of other works that comprised its soul. Wasn’t every shop inevitably the expression of its owner’s individuality? Nobody could know a million books.
    Limits were essential, therefore. Every bookseller selected from what they knew and liked. This gave the bookshop its own personality. Then there were orders from customers who asked for certain books they couldn’t find among the stock. If this happened frequently, the bookseller would buy copies of the title to have it in stock for when the next customer came asking for it. And that’s how a bookshop evolved, like a child that grows up, severing the umbilical cord from its parents and developing its own character, its distinct personality: unpredictable, idiosyncratic and full of surprises. But the more strongly this character is developed, the more strength and empathy it needs to master it and show off itsbest. It’s like a hot-blooded horse that needs a first-rate rider.
    Valerie, however, was not a particularly good rider. To tell the truth, she wasn’t a rider at all. In actual fact, she had the feeling, even after just a few weeks, that she was the one being ridden here. If she trotted in one direction (for example by drawing up a new price list) the strange world of bookselling would mercilessly rein her in (because prices are fixed by the publisher long before the product is in the shops). If she galloped in the opposite direction (let’s say by means of bold discounting to gain greater support from publishing partners) the law would force her to make a U-turn (in this case because discounts in Germany are only allowed up to a certain level; anything beyond this is termed ‘unfair competition’). The combination of stipulations, conventions, customs, regulations, and therefore opportunities, appeared such a complex amalgam that big leaps seemed out of bounds from the beginning. It was only with content that there were no limits and this lack of limits was so absolute that, in addition to the aforementioned qualities needed for the felicitous management of a successful bookshop, Valerie soon stumbled upon the final, equally indispensable, requirement: unqualified madness.
    Experienced readers of novels that deal with booksellers may at this juncture argue that another fixed element is essential for everything to run smoothly: a mysterious female cat that was either a pharaoh or temple dancer in a previous life, or alternatively an