Above: A “book forest” in Berlin’s Prenzlauer Berg, where old books can be left for new readers to discover. Photo by Béatrice de Géa for The New York Times.

Michael Kimmelman pens an ode to Germany’s “D.I.Y. Culture” in the NYT. He inquires about the high volume of bookshops:

Berliners looked nonplussed when I asked them to account for all the bookshops. Along with currywurst and nude saunas, bookstores have long been such a banal fact of life here, as they are across Germany, that only an outsider might bother to think their number was remarkable. The proliferation turned out to derive from a very conscious decision after the war to restore civilization in West Germany by supporting a kind of ecosystem of small publishers and small bookstores to which, in certain small towns, trucks that delivered books to the bookstores overnight also delivered drugs to the drugstores: drugs for the body, books for the mind, a metaphor of recovery.

More on the effects of portability and movement on books here. More on the relationship between writing and pharmacology here, thanks to Plato.