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Holiday bookworm bounty

The Bargain Bookstore Berlin, as generic as the title sounds, has some knock-out art, design, photography and other nerd-worthy literary gifts for you to pick out at cheap prices. But hurry, it may not last long.

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Photo by Ana Garcia de la Blanca

Located next to Prenzlauer Berg’s holiest of espressos, Godshot, The Bargain Bookshop has just “popped-up” to stuff stockings for the Immanuelkirchstraße arterati.

Opening doors on Dec 1 and operating for two months only, the white-walled gallery of new, mint-condition titles focuses on art, architecture, photography and design, as Hamburg-born bibliophile Max Erbe takes a break from more than 20 years of wholesaling books to create something more stationary for the festive season.

As the name suggests, this 2000-strong bilingual library of pocket-happy prices averagely range from €15-20. The real gems still cost a bit more, but with books such as the out-of-print Hokusai retrospective catalogue (no longer attainable from Martin-Gropius-Bau) or collector’s editions of Alberto Moravia’s Claudia Cardinale, hand-signed by the screen siren (€50), who cares?

Such beauties neighbour Marc Chagall and the Lost Jewish World (€10), Bauhaus: A Conceptual Model (€15), Japanese Goth (€10), One Thousand Drawings by Tracey Emin (€35) and illustrated titles covering Raphael, Corbusier, Truffaut, Orson Welles, Jeff Koons, Lead Belly and Boris Mikhailov, with more stock arriving frequently.

If the shop proves successful, the Bargain Bookshop could take up permanent residence at this address, liberating Berlin’s poor-but-sexy from a life of pinching from Pro qm’s design snoots. Until then, ditch Amazon and let Erbe help you impress an art babe on the cheap this Christmas.