If you need proof of a successful conversion, sometimes you don’t have to look very far. For example, with a training as an organ builder, you can find yourself as a bookseller after a barbecue with friends.
This is what happened to Willy Hahn, who likes to lead his clients on the trail of intelligent questions rather than directing them to easy answers. And by dint of being surrounded by books, of devouring novelties to better advise them, the pen itches, and we start to write, first on social networks.
Then, noticed by the Strasbourg publisher Pierre Marchant, the idea of talking about his daily life as a bookseller caught on. Who has never thought after a certain time in a field “I have to write a book!”. Well here it is, Willy Hahn has done it: Aïcha and the 40 readers is coming out at Beau Jardin, in the Herbarium collection, a little gem of humor, tenderness, insolence, a collection of encounters: a young woman in our time ; an accountant, a librarian, a father filled with pride for his daughter: these are around sixty sensitive portraits, sometimes funny, sometimes less, but always accurate. These are the customers who come through the door of Willy Hahn’s “open book” bookstore. Independent bookseller in Wissembourg, Willy Hahn offers you with these portraits an overview of his profession, and the incredible wealth offered to him by the readers who cross his threshold. His short texts make us love without restraint, mock without malice, they make us laugh and think. In the encounters that Willy Hahn shares with us, we measure how booksellers are not just booksellers, but means of transport to elsewhere.
This little collection available at 17€ from your favorite bookseller, who will surely recognize themselves in it, does a lot of good. It is also illustrated by another Alsatian, Jack Koch, and prefaced by the writer, journalist and director Frédérique Deghelt.
The book was published by the Beau Jardin in the Collection l’Herbier. The book’s illustrator is Jack Koch.
Price : 17 € in all good bookstores.
“Open book” bookstore
4 rue du Marché aux Poissons
67160 Wissembourg
Phone. : 0033 3 88 54 46 93
Email: [email protected]