Co-manager
This year, Beat Hutter will share his position as manager of the Goetheanum Bookshop with Claude Million, who will then take over from him in 2021.
Claude Million knows the book business because he worked for the medical publisher Karger in Basel, for a legal publishing house in Bern and for the non-fiction department of Bider and Tanner in Basel (all CH). Over the coming year he will be introduced to the Goetheanum Bookshop by the present manager, Beat Hutter. The length of the introduction period is due to the specific nature of this shop.
“In anthroposophical publishing we are dealing with a complex landscape,” Claude Million says, “aside from ordering from wholesalers we have direct contact with many small and micro-publishers and with self-publishing authors who sell their books in our shop.”
There are book-display tables on topics as far-reaching as the events that take place at the Goetheanum, from education to agriculture to medicine. Depending on whether or not there are conferences at the Goetheanum at any particular time, customer numbers in the bookshop vary between a few dozen and up to a thousand within a few days. Anthroposophical specialist books are available in nine languages including English, French, Italian, Russian, Spanish, Japanese and Chinese.
The Goetheanum Bookshop also has a children’s corner and offers specifically anthroposophical products such as oloids, copper balls and copper rods, window pictures and colour pigments. As in any other bookshop, any orderable book can be ordered, including antiquarian ones – a service that is available seven days a week.