How an editor works: Is that for the bin?

His time is 1:07 p.m.

Then Jürgen Hosemann posts a new bon mot on Twitter.

He started in 2019. At that time, his colleague Sophie Priester was looking for material for S. Fischer's account.

Hosemann has been working for the publishing house on Hedderichstraße in Sachsenhausen for 25 years: "I said I can make a sentence every day about reading, writing and everything that goes with it." That's what happened, with the hashtag "Hosemann's wastepaper basket", to the delight of many.

He now publishes what he calls “insights” on his own account

, mostly during the lunch break, like on the first day, and Fischer-Verlag retweets them.

Florian Balke

Culture editor in the Rhein-Main-Zeitung.

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Hosemann often only writes a single sentence.

There is a whole story in the one from November 24, 2022: "We were the main characters in two different novels and were waiting for the one who read us together." Two people, one plot, a small dose of tragedy, a pinch of irony, and a light-handed one at that Play with the literary levels and all in just 16 words.

It's usually even shorter.

"Strong desire to work in a bookstore - as a reader," it says on December 2, 2022. Hosemann never needs much space for spite, comedy, longing and melancholy.

"I think I know what I want to write now: nothing," read the tweet the day before.

waste of the authors

On the one hand, the fact that he doesn't take his ideas too seriously is indicated by the wastepaper basket title he gave them.

What ends up in the trash can is what its authors reject or what he talks them out of.

What's left over at the end of the working day and can be taken away lies in the wastepaper baskets in offices, not only in Frankfurt.

Disposable products are not Hosemann's ideas for him.

On the contrary: they are precious.

He had already collected clever, amusing and thoughtful formulations by other authors before he decided to write down his own ideas as well.

But he is humble.

And believes the ironic, brief gesture rather than the figure of the editor, who suddenly feels the author in himself.

In this way, the ideas always keep the middle between ideas and objections, creativity and the immediately included deconstruction.

That's why they tend to be stories of failure.

The last entry so far, Hosemann is currently on winter vacation with his family, is from January 3rd: "At the New Year's Eve party I made an interesting remark on the subject of narrative theories, whereupon my conversation partner immediately signaled that she wanted to listen to me longer (, You, I'm just going to get something to drink.')" Whether members of the book industry make themselves look ridiculous on duty or fall on the noses of civilians, Hosemann has a thing for such ideas: "I have the feeling that they celebrate the idiot.

Laconic apologist

Indeed they do.

But the skeptic often becomes downright poetic: "The first snow outside the window and you want to write about it right away, but what could be nicer than the first snow outside the window?" Much of his work revolves around writing, writing and Marketing literary texts, the vanities of the book industry, other things that are generally human.

But Hosemann always stays tight and doesn't make a book out of it.

Some of his authors would develop entire novels from certain of his ideas.