A great bookshop feels curated.  As you wander around, browsing the shelves and table-tops, you sense a presiding influence and intelligence.  This is no random collection of books, thrown together haphazardly.  There’s a force behind it: a discerning, discriminating, opinionated mind.  This is a community bookshop.  Not a community defined by place, but a community of interest with a clear-sighted taste-maker in charge.  You sense some explicit bloody-mindedness.  “If you don’t like what we stock, turn around and walk out”.

do you read me?! is the archetypal curated bookshop.  It can be found in a pretty part of Berlin-Mitte.  Its neighbors are the small galleries and coffee shops you find all over the quiet, charming streets near St. Hedwig’s hospital and the old Jewish cemetery.  I was wandering around and exploring the area, so it was pure happenstance that I discovered the store. It’s a place with a clear focus, though not necessarily one that’s easy to put into words.  It covers the many intersections where design, fashion, architecture, and politics meet.  Force me to summarize its inventory and I’d say “contemporary culture” (with a decidedly European twist).  As you might expect, it’s heavy on small-circulation, independent magazines and journals.  Books are less prominent, but I uncovered a few gems I can’t imagine finding in more mainstream bookshops, and came away with a copy of Walter Benjamin’s Berlin Childhood Circa 1900.

Some cities get bookshops that capture and encapsulate them perfectly at a particular moment in time.  Berlin, with its counter-cultural, forward-looking, and confident energy has do you read me?!