2012 marks the 12th year anniversary of Berlin’s well-loved Pro qm book store. It was founded by Axel Wieder, Katja Reichard and Jesko Fezer, primarily as a place of discussion and exchange in a time of rapidly accelerating change in the city. Their aquisative interests in urban politics and visual culture resulted in a refreshing conceptual layout and consistently inspired stock and events programme; assets that have maintained their reputation as one of the best regarded bookshops in Berlin. Here we speak to Axel about their journey so far:

Axel and Katja

How did Pro QM come about?

During the 90s, Katja Reichard, Jesko Fezer and I worked together on many projects in the fields of visual arts and architecture critique, such as the ‘Baustop Randstadt’, an exhibition, lecture and film series that took place between the NGBK space and FSK cinema around 1996 in Kreuzberg. These projects dealt with the urban development in Berlin at that time in relation to questions of representation, social space, the public – debates that were politically and artistically urgent at that time. With the experience of these cultural projects, especially their temporary structure, we felt a necessity to create a structure that we could work with in the long term, besides other things we are still involved in. The idea of the bookshop was to create such a space, which is also not dependent on sponsorships or funding.

When you started Pro QM did you feel like there was a gap in the market?

Definitely. Like many others, we were living in East Berlin, and back then there were only a few interesting book shops, most of them in the West, such as Bücherbogen in Charlottenburg or b_books in Kreuzberg with a focus on politics and philosophy. A special place for contemporary art or the urban discourse was missing, which were major topics because they were so relevant to the city, and still are. Berlin changed rapidly when the city became the capital of the reunified Germany again. There were so many political implications and changes in the urban fabric. We conceived the bookshop as a place to reflect on these changes and a space for discussion. From the beginning we hosted many events, often connected to these topics.

How did you select the books you wanted to sell?

Initially we started from our own points of interest and built clusters of books that we found relevant to those areas. I guess we thought of Pro qm as a map of questions or topics, then found books that related to those questions. Instead of providing a full A-Z selection we tried to go beyond traditional categorisation, arranging books according to questions such as ‘how do we live?’, ‘what’s the role of the user?’ and ‘what is theory in design?’. Today, for practical reasons and because the stock has grown so significantly, the store is arranged into more general categories such as Design, Architecture, Cultural Studies, Urbanism and Art, and then again divided into more specific questions.

You started off at Alte Schönhauserstraße (where the Vans store is now located), why did you move?

We moved in 2007 for two reasons. The old store was too small with no possibility to expand, and the street was changing dramatically. When we moved into that space the street was still mostly small stores, semi-legal bars, and craftsmen, such as plumbers. It wasn’t a commercial street, and that really changed quite quickly – in a strange way, we were even a part of this change. But at some point the rent was going up and we wanted to grow, so we had to look for new spaces. We found these beautiful rooms in the same area, in a street which is a bit quieter and built by the modernis architect Hans Pölzig who realized many buildings in this area, such as Kino Babylon.

Do you have a favourite bookstore yourself that has been an inspiration?

The history of artist run bookshops has been very important for us; Hilka Nordhausen’s Buch Handlung Welt in Hamburg was a meeting point in the 1970s and 80s where people could sell their self-published books and magazines. She had an amazing collection of artist and poet books and invited artists to show paintings specifically produced for a large wall in the store, mostly painted directly onto the wall. Printed Matter in New York was also very important, which was the first major forum for conceptual artist publications. Another influence has been the so-called Infoläden, places to circulate books and other information related to leftist or alternative political activities, where you could leave leaflets and posters or buy cheaply reproduced booklets. These are interesting places, as they have their own kind of very specific economy.  They understand that information has a lot to do with the logic of distribution.

Do you have a favourite book in your time as a book seller?

Having dealt with a lot of books, I’m somehow more interested in the flows of information rather than the singular objects. However, there’s an out-of-print one that comes to mind – Architecture Reproduction which is part of a series by American architecture theorists Beatriz Colomina and Joan Ockman. It’s an early book which reflects on the relationship between architecture and media formats, such as the exhibition or the printed page. For our idea of running a bookshop this relationship is very important- we recognise it not as secondary, but as its own kind of production.

For your twelfth anniversary you are selling tote bags with twelve different designs, how did you choose the artists?

We’ve focused on people that we’ve worked with in the past. Most are designers, such as Metahaven, Abäke or Laurenz Brunner,some are artists, such as Judith Hopf or Bernadette Corporation. We’ve tried to have a selection that presents people of various backgrounds. They each designed one bag as a gift for us. It’s a nice way to have different beautiful bags.

Is there much of a community between book and magazine stores in Berlin?

Yes, we work a lot with Alexis Zavialoff from Motto, since Motto is also a distribution company. They have a slightly different focus,but we have a lot of shared interests. We worked together on this year’s self-publishing exhibition Miss Read for the program and organized a shared shop for the exhibition “Based in Berlin” at Monbijoupark. In 2007 we ran the bookshop for documenta in Kassel, together with b_books. So, one of the good aspects of the situation in Berlin is that there is still enough space to develop different places with different agendas, not only co-existing, but even cooprating.

Do you have any thoughts on the future of books and how we obtain information with the rise of the internet and modern resources?

How we read books and looking at a magazine is very much about the feeling of an object in your hands. Many publications have a playful approach to what it means to be a magazine or a book, experimenting with different kinds of binding and materiality. On the other hand, we read a lot online. Reading is omnipresent, through mobile devices. I’m sure that both forms will exist in the future, in some ways and for different reasons. For the book market, the changes in the distribution system are currently the most important ones. We buy more and more online – I can observe these through my own shopping habits. As a shop, it is necessary to adapt to these changing routines. We’re bringing increasing parts of our content online, and are working on a convenient shopping system. This will not replace the possibility to come to the store and look at the books yourself, but it will be an important and helpful addition.