Nomen est omen: Walther König, king of the art-booksellers
In a candid conversation with Benedikt Taschen, Cologne-based legend of the art and book worlds reveals what makes him run (3 miles of shelves full of art books), gets him upset (disrespectful customers who scan bar codes), and how he ended up being a happy man (happiness found him).
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BT: Neat little office you've got here! Who's that beside you, Mr. König, in this picture?
WK: It's [Martin] Kippenberger, it was the time he designed the window display. It's real funny, that picture – he's standing there, with his painter's smock and palette, just like you'd imagine an artist to be.... Kippenberger was a permanent guest here; he always arrived around 4 o'clock in the afternoon, sat himself down at the table and held court, served the customers.
BT: And uncorked the bottle ...
WK: Yes, the trainees always had to fetch apple juice with gin from across the street, so you couldn't taste the alcohol. I miss Kippenberger a lot!
BT: He was such a generous man, too... with a really pleasant manner.
WK: Yes, but a lot of people were afraid of Kippenberger, because he always made dumb jokes, but he never really did that here in the bookstore, he was always very serious.
BT: Has anyone been in this morning with their iPhone and scanned books they're going to order from Amazon?
WK: Every day, it happens all the time.
BT: Do they do it in secret, or are they quite open about it?
WK: No, no one does it secretly any more, no one's embarrassed these days. In the past, people still had a bit of respect and would write down the ISBN in hiding. Today people use us like a public library. People write stuff down, photograph pages from books, scan them, without the slightest inhibition.
BT: What do you do with people like that?
WK: We don't do anything, we just get sour and have to bottle the sourness up inside. The business with prices is our biggest problem, in fact. Many publishers have now started massively undercutting us, their own customers. What's your policy on this – do you stick to your guns in your shops?
BT: You bet! I mean, we won't try and compete
with our fellow retailers on price.
WK: What happens when Amazon sells your Eliasson Encyclopedia, for example?
BT: When it comes to our expensive books, as a rule they don't normally drop the price, but a book that might cost 50 dollars in a shop will cost maybe 33 dollars from Amazon, at least in countries that don't have a fixed price agreement.
WK: It doesn't affect booksellers who only stock books in German. But even though we're not a foreign language bookstore, more than half our titles still come from publishers outside Germany. Still, it's hard to argue against it.
BT: Exactly, and then you've got it at home two days later, and you don't even have to carry it!
WK: Think about it, though – at the end of the day it's going to mean your books aren't on public sale in bookstores anymore and you're only going to be able to sell them over the internet. The real bummer is the fact that we retail booksellers are used as a source of information but get no business. It's an insoluble problem, in fact. But I feel publishers ought to give it some thought all the same, because we are not only your customers but also your public. Picture this: in ten years' time you won't be able to physically pick up a third of your titles, let's say, before you actually order them.
BT: So would you say that the internet is increasing the variety of books, or do you think the opposite is true?
WK: I don't think the internet is leading to a greater range of books. It's simply another sales outlet. Amazon and the like have got their systems so perfect that nowadays a bookseller running a store needs to be pretty smart to be able to answer the very specific questions that customers ask. In its systems and service, Amazon can't be topped.
BT: And of course it's all usually done with the help of the publishing houses, because it's they who provide the information.
WK: Yes, that's right! But it will be the end of bookstores if we come to exist merely as exotic specimens, satisfying people who love books as luxury items, but no longer selling to the general public... It's quite simple: if we lose 20 to 25% of our turnover, we can shut up shop. We need 80% of our turnover to cover our costs. We essentially depend for our livelihood upon our customers in the public sector, in other words institutes and libraries, and of course upon a large number of collectors, whom we service by mail order and who call in to the store two or three times a year if they can. But although we allow ourselves the luxury of a large premises and staff, if it turns out that these are underused and this is reflected in our turnover, we could always move to the outskirts...
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"Kippenberger was a permanent guest here." Walther König in his office in Cologne, April 2011. Photo: Benedikt Taschen.
"That was when everything kicked off. It was the first art fair in the world." König in action at his stand at the Cologne art fair, 1972.
