ritas kleine welt

it was the book fair of 2004 when i started hunting down authors so that they would scribble something in the books i had purchased over the years. at the time of the Leipziger Buchmesse that year, a very lucky streek was started and ever since then, i have been collecting signatures. but i have never been that successful numberwise as i was in that year.

things i overheard while talking to myself. phew. what a title. what a man! the informed reader may have already heard about last june's wonderous encounter with alan and his wife, arlene, on an abandoned evening road in the city centre of leipzig. well, this story has a prequel.

long time, no read. somehow i have forgotten to write an entry in this category for january. just shows you where my mind is these days. so this time around, i will present another signature i gathered during the leipzig book fair in 2004. on that one day, i had stuffed my backpack with about five books and a list on which i ticked off the different authors, i had already successfully bothered into signing one of the copies i shoved under their noses. they were all very friendly, except for erich loest. who seemed a trifle grumpy. but apart from that, one remained victorious and returned home with a signed copy of es geht seinen gang!

last year, in 2007, was a good year for collecting signatures. come to think of it, half of the signatures i have collected so far are from that year. granted, i don't have that many to begin with, 6 isn't so much of a staggering number. but in comparison to the years before and this year, it was one big success where bugging authors is concerned.

some many moons ago, it must have been in the year 2004, i took a copy of jeffrey eugenides' novel middlesex in hand to take along to a public reading. the detroit born prophet author was in town for the leipziger buchmesse and i thought i'd make a day of it and haunt the poor fella. i was on the first official quest to collect a signature in a book i had purchased not so much earlier then.

after the reading from his novel the virgin suicides and answering a number of questions from the audience (he was looking for someone to move into his old apartment in berlin because he and his family were moving back to michigan at the time), i began to get a bit nervous. by the time i hade qued up in front of his desk i was a nervous wreck. mind you, the man is my contemporary literature god! i stammered some nonedescript syllabels, he smiled and scribled.

the rest of the evening i spent floating two inches above the floor.

i am particularly proud and happy to present you with the following signature. ottokar domma signed a copy of collected ottokar stories. this book was given to me on my ninth birthday by a friend. when i read it the following years, i just found the stories of the do-gooder ottokar simply amusing. he was something like a school jester who happened to share his school days with the strangest teachers and the quirkiest friends the planet had ever seen. but in later years, i discovered the cynicism and satire that is lying underneath each and every of the stories and was thinking to myself: HOW did the author ever get away with it during the GDR?!?

so let's kick off the new month with another signed copy of a novel from my personal bookshelf. this time, i would like to present you with toby litt's finding myself. it is the quirky story of a female author who invites a handful of her friends to summer hols in an english country house. her plan is to predict the goings-on and influence the (unknowing) participants in the experiment so that they begin to behave acording to plan. of course, some 50 pages into the novel things begin to pretty much fall apart.

the story of the novel is hilariously strange -- just like its author.

this month's bookshelf brings to you a signature by another one of germany's greatest actors. manfred krug read from bertolt brecht's keuner stories during the leipzig book fair a couple of years ago. the reading was held free of charge in the entrace hall of the train station and concluded with a signature session afterwards.

it's that time of the month again where i am posting pictures of a signed copy from my bookshelf. however, this time it comes with a little twist. naturally, i couldn't have possibly met with alfred döblin because he was long since dead before i was even born. but that doesn't mean one cannot ever get a signature anyway...

a couple of years ago the theatre in berlin put up a production of berlin. alexanderplatz with ben becker cast in the leading role of franz biberkopf. he may not be the most dashing of men, when compared with, let's say george clooney. then on the other hand -- george clooney isn't ben becker. the german actor plays his roles with such verve, vulnerability and raw emotion that there is no way to avoid falling for him. (pictures may be found here and here.) and then there's his voice and speech. sometimes he talks in a very stilted, distinguished way and at other times he just drifts off and jabbers away in his berlin dialect. needless to say, he was the perfect choice to read the audio edition for döblin's novel.

it's time for a new entry from the bookshelf. this time you see a book i "won" at a seminar auction. our lecturer, prof. dr. elmar schenkel, was collecting money to be sent to india to support a school project so that the wee ones were able to buy a set of new school books. he made € 200 that year -- and a lot of kids were really happy.

in order to support the english department's trip to scotland (well, ok, it's only a small group who are actually going, but who starts nitpicking, i ask?), i made a little donation to their little "help-fund-our-trip-fundraiser". not only were they selling homemade cake, coffee and tea, but a couple of lecturers and the students themselves sold off some of their books second hand. this is how i came by the following copy -- handsigned and personally dedicated by the author himself, one of the world's best lecturers i ever had, of course!