“The present time is imbued with the future” – A look back and a look ahead

You can’t start early enough to look for Christmas gifts, which is why I recently – bearing in mind the famous Leibniz quote – headed off to the bookshop. It was the Saturday after Black Friday, which had sloshed over here from the USA. Interesting, I thought: all the shops are offering whopping sales except the bookshop, due to the fixed prices on books in Germany, but it was nevertheless jam-packed, almost fuller than the other stores. After I had already filled up my shopping basket with novels, I arrived at the history section. And there I could hardly believe my eyes: big fat and fattest books, almost nothing under a thousand pages.