One summer night, years ago, my wife and I were rushing to pub trivia when we were distracted by a box of free books on the street. We both bent down to take a peek – anything good? The box, seemingly discarded by a single household, contained the following: three quantum physics textbooks, one French existentialism anthology, and two identical copies of The Smart Girl’s Guide to Polyamory by Dedeker Winston. This household has haunted my wife and me since. Wherever they are now, together or apart, we really, really hope they’re okay.
Finding books zu verschenken is one of the great joys of readerly Berlin life. We should all support our local bookstores, of course. But in a country where the word for “bookworms” is Leseratten (“reading-rats”), there is surely nothing wrong with a little streetside scavenging. A book found zu verschenken is the city’s gift to you. One editor at The Berliner spent months coveting two specific books, almost buying them a few times – then saw them both in great condition on the street.
Giveaway books can tell a story about society at the macro level.
At other times, the gift is just the story it suggests: In East Berlin, my friend Gabriel came upon a giveaway of just two things: Stalin’s Werke and Bill Clinton’s autobiography Mein Leben. (The end of history!) The literary agent Martin Shaw remembers stumbling upon a box with two relationship advice books: one offered “the new art of finding a man for life”, the other “the art of keeping a man for life”. Another friend spotted a copy of The Ethical Slut and wondered which part of the title its owner mastered – or abandoned.
Occasionally the mystery lies in the book itself. Former owners leave you clues with things like marginalia, tickets used as bookmarks or heartfelt inscriptions by people who probably didn’t think the book would then get tossed. (Once I watched a friend pick up a beautiful free copy of Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse and walk five gleeful paces before suddenly grimacing and putting it back because it was “like, incredibly greasy”; who’s setting Modernist boobytraps in Neukölln?).
Giveaway books can tell a story about society at the macro level, too, be it the heartbreaking boxes of used DDR fiction in hypergentrifying Boxhagener Kiez, the heartwarming piles of abandoned Karl Mays all over town, or the deliciously ironic proliferation of discarded Marie Kondo books ca. 2015–2020. Who tidies the tidier?!
Literature zu verschenken defies the logic of our cultural moment, which specialises in giving you infinite amounts of what you already know you like. If you want romantasy with faeries, you get romantasy with faeries; if you want huge European novels with really long sentences translated by a big hairy hunk, well, there’s a publisher dedicated to that. But what room does that leave for the chance encounter? “That thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you is usually what you need to find,” wrote Rebecca Solnit, “and finding it is a matter of getting lost.”
Lost, that is, then found. Zu verschenken is a gift, an act of city-sharing faith, both when you take and when you deposit. Sometimes it’s actually life-changing: finding an abandoned copy of Ivan Klíma’s Love and Garbage triggered my years-long love for Czech literature (and faltering attempts to learn the language). Other times it’s just funny, or indeed oily. But always it helps us remember that we live in a society – and that one person’s garbage deserves another person’s love.
