Bogladen Ved Søerne

Such a beautiful bookstore! The building is quaint and filled to the brim with books. There is a main level and then a spiral staircase leading to a lower level. When one enters the store, literary fiction is to the right, poetry is to the left, and there are travel books inside the right corner just above the split level alcove. My goal was to buy a book of Danish poetry, as one of my learning strategies for learning Danish from afar involves me translating a poem from Danish into English every Sunday and attempting to read the Danish poem to my Danish boyfriend over Skype. It is quite difficult to find Danish poems online. Solution: buy books here!
The poetry section consists of three shelves and it appeared to me that there was a good mix of very famous Danish poets and other contemporary Danish poets. There also seemed to be poetry that the authors had published through smaller presses, as the covers were of the artistic sort rather than the mass produced sort. Much to my pleasure there also seemed to be just as much poetry written by people with traditionally female names as there was poetry written by people with traditionally male names. I ended up with the collected poems of Tove Ditlevsen (DKK 199,95; $ 29).
There were two shopkeepers in the store when I was there, and the one seemed very friendly as she helped another customer and the other was very friendly as she rang me up (and, of course, had no problem switching to English when she asked me a question in Danish that I did not understand).
Why only four stars? It could use a bigger and more varied selection of greeting cards. Picky, picky, I know, but that’s the best part of American independent bookstores, in my humble opinion. Nevertheless the store does have the required display of Moleskine notebooks!