- TOP STORIES
- Media Center
- PROGRAM
- LEARN GERMAN
German Courses
Community D
Teaching German
Chocolates, chips and novels
To counter the trend, the Berlin publishing company Sukultur hit upon the idea of putting literature within the economic and practical reach of people. It began placing small books costing €1 ($1.28) in candy vending machines at railway stations across Germany.
Vending machines with the small Sukultur novels
The tiny yellow books, reminiscent of the famous Reclam series featuring works by literary greats like Goethe, Kant and Shakespeare, compete with chocolate bars, chips and gummi bears. Unlike the school-book series the texts in the vending machines feature largely unknown, young authors and journalists who write offbeat short stories and poems no longer than 24 pages.
"We want to make good literature more accessible to the common man," said Frank Maleu, head of Sukultur. "We want to strip it of its hallowed status and give a person the feeling that it's just another consumer product like a chocolate bar."
Maleu's calculation that the concept would draw on a pool of untapped readers -- commuters and people on the move -- seems to be working. The company, which tries to publish four new books each month, has sold some 10,000 of them since they launched the idea at the end of 2003.
Frank Bartschel, a 36-year-old engineer who bought one of the books -- his second so far -- along with a candy bar at Berlin's main Zoo railway station, said it made perfect reading for his daily 40-minute commute to work.
"There are days when I don't want to read the latest unemployment figures in the paper and it's great instead to throw myself into a good story," he said. "And I'm always finished just before my stop arrives."
"Fun and original"
Good and cheap and even smaller seems to be Munich-based publishing company Blumenbar's mantra. Last year, the tiny company unveiled the so-called cigarette novel -- available for €2 at bookstores -- just months after the EU issued directives that cigarette packs must carry dire and prominent warnings such as "Smokers die earlier" or "Smoking leads to impotence."
The cigarette novels
The concept involves very short stories printed on two sides of a tiny cardboard cover that can be slipped over a cigarette packet and cover up the health warnings. The publishing company has recruited famous names like "Russian Disco" author Vladimir Kaminer and filmmaker Doris Dörrie to write the stories.
"It's not a statement about smoking but rather against an aesthetically repulsive health warning in typical governmental fashion," said Wolfgang Farkas, head of Blumenbar. "We thought the idea was fun and original and provided ordinary people with a good, cheap read."
Platform for budding authors
There's also a positive fallout to the unconventional initiatives to popularize literature: It allows a much-needed platform for young, budding writers and playwrights to get their works across to a larger audience. Blumenbar, for instance, last year held a competition for young authors to write their cigarette novels in the future. Some 700 people entered.
Frimmer of the "door speakers" project said some of their authors were first timers, too.
"The anonymity works perfectly because the concept affords them a kind of protection, " she said.
