Books and Bagels: Shakespeare & Sons, Berlin

Shelf Awareness

After graduating from university, Roman Kratochvila, a native of the Czech Republic, worked for a year at the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, France. He had never worked as a bookseller before; a friend who worked at the store was leaving and set Kratochvila up with the job. After that, there was no looking back. "I loved it," said Kratochvila. "I decided [bookselling] was what I wanted to do."

He returned to the Czech Republic in 2002 and opened an English-language bookstore in Prague. He named it Shakespeare & Sons, a nod to the institution where he fell in love with bookselling. Since then, he's opened a second bookstore in the Czech Republic and, in May 2011, he opened the third Shakespeare & Sons, in the Prenzlauer Berg neighborhood of Berlin.

Roman Kratochvila

Katrochvila owns and operates the store with his wife, Laurel, who is American. They spend most of their time in Berlin, but travel back to the Czech Republic a few times per month. There are two other employees as well, one who helps with baking and running the cafe and another who helps with the book side of the business.

The approximately 1,100-square-foot store features a full cafe, with homemade bagels as a specialty, and stocks between 20,000 and 30,000 volumes. Although the overall inventory is split roughly in half between new and used books, the makeup of certain sections varies. Fiction, for example, consists almost entirely of new titles, and is the store's strongest section.

According to Kratochvila, contemporary fiction, particularly books by "youngish American authors," tend to do extremely well. The Marriage Plot, Jeffrey Eugenides's most recent novel, has been Shakespeare & Sons' bestselling title to date. Fiction and nonfiction pertaining to Berlin also do very well, along with "expat writers" such as Fitzgerald and Hemingway.

The store has a very inviting, living-room type of feel; it is the sort of place customers come to relax and read all afternoon. The front room contains the cafe and, against one wall, the fiction section. The next rooms are replete with couches, comfy chairs and coffee tables, and house the history, YA, children's and genre sections, among others. The back room is the reading room, and holds the drama, poetry, philosophy, science and used fiction sections.Although the cafe has proven to be a good draw, Kratochvila described it as a "work in progress." Bagels were added to the menu recently, and he plans to continue expanding the food offerings.

Shakespeare & Sons also hosts occasional events, including film screenings and poetry readings. This week poets Donna Stonecipher, Laurynas Katkus and Shane Anderson will read their work. Last month, Marianne Elliott, author of Zen Under Fire: How I Found Peace in the Midst of War (Sourcebooks), read from and talked about her book. Kratochvila is planning for a big event early next year, which will feature designers from the Curved House, a design company that works primarily for publishers. Each visiting designer will be given shelf space to fill with books they like and books they designed.

Asked how he went about planning the event and recruiting the designers, Kratochvila shrugged. "I'm just friends with them. It's fun." --Alex Mutter