Walther-king, 80.: A Kingdom for the book

“Can I help?” The question is also a welcome greeting. The visitors made the ascent on the tight arc of the staircase to the first floor and stands in a landscape of books. Help you find your way here, no one can well as the lean gentleman with the architect’s head: after all, it is his Kingdom that he has built up in fifty years. The Name of the artist is enough, and Walther König know what it is about him – and usually an anecdote. Here, the Chef served! At his eightieth birthday which he celebrates today, as we enter into each bet. Because, the münster merchant’s son confesses: “I love not only books, but also love it, books are cheap to buy and expensive to sell.”

Andrew Rossmann

editor in the features section.

F. A. Z.

That booksellers love books and love to sell, is normal. What Walther König makes an exception, is something else. His “Store” in Cologne, a treasure-house to fill, in the art books four thousand linear metres. The customer can spreads to take a seat at a table, where, perhaps, an artist is sitting in the drafts for a book. Because the king is because his second favorite pastime, which, since his son, Franz, 2014, has taken over the business, his first. He leads, how he stacks like deep, a “small publisher”, which brings to the two hundred titles in the year books, art in every price range and size, from “Atlas” by Gerhard Richter exhibition catalogues, up to the writings of Harun Farocki and scientific texts.

“anonymous, please order now!

As a pulpit of the Bay window hanging over the street, but king not to remember, to look out of the window, since the place Willy Millowitsch – instead, as he suggested, to Sigmar Polke – is named. He worked out better, with the authors calling, and secretly Roth-Händle Smoking, to book projects. His program stems from his affinity with the authors: The publisher knows a lot of them since their beginnings and leaves you a free Hand. King came at the right Moment to Köln. During his studies, he worked in a bookstore, hung the law on the nail, was looking for a Curriculum, and began in 1962 in the “books tube at the Cathedral”. As he did in 1969, self-employed, Peter Ludwig just showed his Pop Art collection. The publisher was already established that the one or the other Council Ernst Brücher, who headed the then neighboring DuMont book publishing house. In 1981, king has opened in Cologne, the first Museum in the bookstore, today, he operates three of the ten in Berlin alone, and more than forty stores between London and Vienna, Amsterdam and Milan.