Above the book "The Holy Family" by Marx/Engels hangs a note in the shop window: "Successor urgently needed." Annette Haschtmann, owner of the antiquarian bookshop on Bornwiesenweg, is closing an institution in the north end after 33 years.

Much to the disappointment of passers-by, who stop and browse the book tables on the sidewalk.

But the seventy-two-year-old feels "old enough to quit," she says.

“Do more sport, go to third age university, meet friends, have time for art and literature,” she looks forward to.

Dieter Schwoebel

Sheet maker in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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She never believed that she would ever run an antiquarian bookshop, even though her father owned a mail-order antiquarian bookshop.

But the young woman from Frankfurt had other plans.

She belonged to the 1968 movement, demonstrated against emergency laws, old Nazis and the exploitation of the "Third World".

She studied sociology, worked in the Karl Marx bookstore and helped found the first women's bookstore.

Used reading material at a low price

In 1979 she was about to leave Germany.

She traveled with her boyfriend to Bolivia, where a democratic government had been elected and what she says was “a revolutionary situation”.

The couple hitchhiked across the country, enthralled by the struggle of farm workers against their oppressors.

"We could well imagine staying there." But the military staged a coup and the dreams were shattered.

After eight months, they returned home disillusioned.

Back in Frankfurt, Haschtmann worked in a crèche and in a collective that produced the left-wing “information service for the dissemination of missing messages”, where she learned to print.

But that was not a perspective.

So it came about that in 1987, together with her business partner Hans ter Wolbeek, she took over the former mail order antiquarian bookshop Rolf Kerst, which her father Werner had co-founded in 1949 and which he took over in 1969 and named after him.

Two years later, Haschtmann and ter Wolbeek, who left again in 2005, opened the antiquarian bookshop on Bornwiesenweg as a second mainstay, specializing in philosophy, politics, history, critical theory and women's literature.

At that time, according to the married mother of one daughter, there were a dozen antiquarian bookshops in Frankfurt, today there are probably less than half.

The shops could not survive in the long run with used reading material at a low price, and new orders, such as those offered by Haschtmann, hardly filled the till.

The internet came to the rescue: “In the mid-1990s, we were among the first to launch it and sell books about it.

It was a blessing, otherwise we wouldn't have lasted so long,” says the woman, who prefers a well-made book to an e-reader.

Astonishingly, in her experience, this also seems to be the case for young people.

"They come into the store because they have something as old-fashioned as books," she says wryly.

She calls other customers "real antique shoppers": They regularly roam the shops in search of rare books, but this type is becoming fewer.

In a few days, the antiquarian bookshop will be over.

Haschtmann resigned at the end of the month.

A last takeover prospect who wanted to sell reading material and wine has canceled.

The sale is on - all for half price.

But Haschtmann wants to continue running the less time-consuming mail-order antiquarian bookshop elsewhere under her father's name and offer legal, social science and humanities literature.

Anyone who has worked with books for so many years can't really part with them.