The part of Munich I love best is between Königsplatz and Universität. In the heat of summer as well as in the knee-deep snow of late January, walking here has always been pure bliss.
Getting lost inside Neue Pinakothek early in the morning and then, two hours later, dropping into a tiny bakery at the intersection of Theresienstrasse and Turkenstrasse. A cup of coffee, a slice of ginger cake, a few chapters from a book. Then you walk into Pinakothek der Moderne, completely by accident, and the huge white walls are devastating. The bizarre installations - not so much, but you have seen enough galleries of modern art not to be disappointed. And then, after a brief visit to the Victorian tea room whose opulent interior would have pleased Oscar Wilde, you might as well find yourself stepping into Schellingstrasse. And here, just by the subway station and the University library, you will find a bookstore named Words' Worth.
Words' Worth. The pun is obvious but it has always been lost on me. Oddly, they only bothered to write the name of the shop on the window and what you see on the signboard above is a fairly desperate 'Anglia English Bookshop'. But who cares.
Because the place is delightful. Two floors of books, books, and more books. Granted, there is all the usual paraphernalia you may expect to find in an English bookshop outside England - china cups, Sherlock Holmes calendars, tote bags with Shakespeare, tea towels with the tedious 'Keep Calm' bullshit. But you feel it's only a clever smokescreen to get rid of tourists with no imagination, so you are willing to forgive. Because upstairs - they have all the classics, and to the left - they have the kind of books you came here for.
In any bookstore I go to, there is a selection of authors and titles I check. It is not that I need those books, not necessarily, it is just that I have to know they are here. I love it when they are around: a collection of poems by Philip Larkin, Herzog by Saul Bellow, Nabokov's Pale Fire, a few of the latest novels by Martin Amis and Ian McEwan. Words' Worth had them all. It's not a huge place, but it had most of my favourite books. They even had a recent and very much impenetrable jungle of words from Will Self. This made me feel at home, a sense intensified by the huge bookcase in the middle of the shop that looked straight from your favourite library.
And then, on top of that, they have a great selection of recently published books you thought were too obscure to sell outside London. But here they were, and I remember being especially impressed by the unexpected appearance of The Clocks In This House All Tell Different Times by Xan Brooks. Xan Brooks has always been one of my favourite Guardian journalists, and to know that he had his debut novel out, and with a name like that, and to see it on a bookshelf in Munich, etc. I was intrigued, and so it was with this book that I found myself on the floor, half-stretched and utterly engrossed. There is a million books in any given bookstore - but for you, there's just one. And I found it.
There's lots of that German warmth about Words' Worth, and you don't really want to leave. Outside, the August sun has faded, the January snow has gone grotesque, and it feels like you've spent a few weeks inside the bookstore. Outside, Schellingstrasse will either lead you to the Universität subway station or to the recently opened NS-Dokumentationszentrum that will no doubt exhaust you both physically and mentally. It could well be the single greatest museum I've ever been to, but I'd suggest leaving it for another day. Because this one is almost done, and you've grown a world inside of you.
