Saved By the Book: How I Warmed Up to Berlin (Part Two)

I spoke with Paul Gurner, owner of the St George’s Bookshop, at Wörther Straße 27 in Prenzlauer Berg. Paul, who had no previous experience in the bookstore business, has been running one of the most successful English bookshops in Berlin since 2003 and is planning to open a larger, second location in the Schöneberg neighborhood in 2017. Paul’s answers to how and why St. George’s came into being might be surprising, as is his attitude to Amazon and other competition from the digital domain. Paul’s responses have been edited.

SK: Have you run a bookstore before? What experience did you bring to the bookselling enterprise?

Wow (he laughs), no one asked whether or not we had experience. We have run businesses before, in England, a couple of businesses, and we were looking for a new project.

You get people coming up from the market [on nearby Kollwitz Straße] and they will come in here and you will ask, are you here ’cause of the market? And they will say, No, we are here ’cause of you.

SK: Where in England?

I grew up in Cambridge, and the business was actually based out of Berkshire, the last one I had. It was furniture.

SK: Ah, so you had a furniture business, this was a furniture business and then you turned it into a bookstore.

Indeed. The shop was empty before we came in here.

SK: Why Berlin?

In 2000, I followed a girlfriend over to Berlin, and she left me stranded here; she moved on to Switzerland or southern Germany, and I stayed. It was a good introduction to the city, although we were in Brandenburg.

SK: So you were looking for a new business, but why an English-language bookshop in a German-speaking country? What made you think, okay that’s what I should do?

We had a lot of books from a business we had invested in. We were going to do some markets and off load them as quickly as possible. But in the end, we decided, I was here anyway, storage here was cheaper, ship ’em across here, have a go.

SK: How many books are we talking?

We had about 20 of these Chesterfield sofas, and 10,000 books. It was ridiculous, actually.

SK: You are not a bibliophile then? You are not crazy about writers and writing…

The bookshop worked cause it’s a business, and we treat it as such. I don’t use it as an excuse to sit around and read; I use it as a business.

SK: How did you come upon 10,000 books?

We — me and my brother — invested into a business that didn’t do too well, a bookshop, and the only thing we could get out of in the end was not our money, but the books. They were well selected, and I think we sold most of those books.

It’s all curated through the customers’ needs. Over the years you see what people want, you see the publishers that sell, you see the authors. There is no doubt that the philosophy is chosen by customers’ orders, but also by the staff.

What was the bookstore landscape like when you first started the shop in 2003?

This was an area where a lot of Americans were coming in, from Charlottenburg, and still quite rough around the edges. It was quite obvious that there should have been a bookshop here.

There were no English bookshops?

There was one in Friedrichshain and we didn’t want to go too close to them. Prenzlauer Berg. It seems a bit obvious, why isn’t anyone there? So we jumped on it as quickly as we could. We got things together and we just opened up, rather naively, but in the end you don’t need a qualification to do it, you don’t need permission to do it, you just do it.

Where do you go to get your books now?

We ship a thousand books across every month from England, used stock. There’s no set place where I do my buying: warehouses that are spread all over the place. I avoid London…over the years you have your set routes, you can find bookshops where you do deals with people. Generally, we get phone calls from people closing shops, downsizing, going online. From a selection of 10,000 to 20,000 books you get a thousand books, you cherry pick them.

Who are you cherry picking, who are you looking for?

From Camus to Ishiguro…Ballard, Nabokov, anyone really, you just got to remember 10,000 names.

At one point you called it a curated collection, can you talk more about that? Curated by whom?

Yeah, it sounds wanky, I know. It’s all curated through the customers’ needs. Over the years you see what people want, you see the publishers that sell, you see the authors. There is no doubt that the philosophy is chosen by customers’ orders, but also by the staff.

In these ten plus years, you have built up your knowledge about books. How many years did it take for the bookstore to take off?

We were really busy from year three and we have kept that. We have a large turn over. This is the first time I have been alone all day.

I think people are slowly reconnecting with browsing. You will have people coming in here with their younger teenage kids and just browse. There was a young mother in here with her 16-year old daughter and they seemed to be having fun, genuine fun looking through the books together.

Are bookstores still thriving in Berlin, and if so, how do they survive in this age of Amazon and internet shopping when they are shutting down elsewhere?

There are more opening up, but there are quite a few closing. Last year we saw two bookshops close that have been there 30 plus years.

So it’s changing here as well?

Exactly. I suppose it’s a bit like clearing out. Bookshops that don’t work close. You got to keep your game up. There was one here in Mitte, four or five years ago, not too far from here, and they closed as well. It must have been an operator error because the customer base is down there. And then another one closed last year. Fair Exchange. They been there donkeys years. They were doing German [books] at the front, English at the back. Again they blamed Amazon…but you just can’t blame Amazon. It’s too easy. Concentrate on your own thing. You never know, I could be ten years down the line and saying the same thing.

So you don’t feel a threat from digital media or Amazon?

Even if everyone in this neighborhood came to us and ordered their books there would be too much work. We don’t advertise, we do our job and people talk about us. It’s worked wonderfully. Amazon do their job and we try to do ours.

I think people are slowly reconnecting with browsing. You will have people coming in here with their younger teenage kids and just browse. There was a young mother in here with her 16-year old daughter and they seemed to be having fun, genuine fun looking through the books together. You can imagine that this is something they might remember. It was actually quite sweet…they sat on the sofa discussing books, and what she’d read and what the daughter might like to read.

Given that 90% of your stock is used, do you cultivate relationships with writers? You said you don’t necessarily have the time or space to do readings.

We don’t get approached that often for readings. People know that we just don’t have the space — if we move everything we can fit about forty people sitting down. We still do poetry readings. It was nice when we first started out…it did make us the customer base…it’s what we would do with the bigger shop in Schöneberg, the shop we are looking to buy, it’s one big room about 90–100 square meters that naturally lends itself to readings.

It’s a bit of a family. I know half the people by sight, probably 20% by name, but purely because my memory with names is terrible. I do wonder about the people who used to be customers, people who have just disappeared off the face of…

Who are your main customers?

You have seen the people who were in here. They were expats, I guess. Expats, not necessarily native English, but I’d say non-German 70/30 during the week, and during the weekend it probably levels out to 50–50, where’s there’s 50% German, maybe growing.

What are the intersections between the German speakers and the Anglophones?

I think the Germans are very slowly realizing that they don’t have to go to these big bookshops to get their books, they don’t have to rely on that kind of traditional way of buying books: they can come to us and we can order the books in and they are considerably cheaper. Amazon is not the cheapest route especially in Germany…

How is the price structure determined in Germany? I know that prices are fixed for books published in Germany, but what about books published in the UK, in the US, elsewhere?

People charge whatever they want.

So there is no regulation on those?

No. We choose to match or beat Amazon prices on 90% of our books, there’s 10% on which we can’t.

I know you don’t have the space for cultivating relationships with writers, but can you talk about cultivating relationships with readers. Do you have neighborhood customers…

It’s a bit of a family. I know half the people by sight, probably 20% by name, but purely because my memory with names is terrible. I do wonder about the people who used to be customers, people who have just disappeared off the face of…

Prenzlauer Berg?

No, our customer base is Berlin, it really isn’t only Prenzlauer Berg. It’s much wider reaching than that. You get people coming up from the market [on nearby Kollwitz Straße] and they will come in here and you will ask, are you here ‘cause of the market? And they will say, No, we are here ‘cause of you.

Editor’s Note: Continue to follow Subhashini Kaligotla as she writes about her travels for Drunken Boat. Next up: the literary festivals of India.