Poems by Peter Maiwald and text contributions by
Jürgen W. Braun and Marcel Reich-Ranicki
Published in 1989 by: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, Cologne

Two volumes of the FSB Edition were published under the heading "Entrances and Exits". One is volume 5: a photographic study by Timm Rautert with contrapuntal word images composed by the writer Jürgen Becker, the other is volume 4: a leporello with poems by Peter Maiwald. At the beginning, Otl Aicher was sceptical concerning the Maiwald project, but finally he abandoned his opposition. "Well, go ahead then with your crazy poetry book", was one of his less caustic comments. But the leporello form designed by Sepp Landsbek appealed to him in the end.

How does an industrial enterprise come into contact with poets and writers? In the case of the photographic study by Timm Rautert, Otl Aicher was the man who put us in touch with Jürgen Becker via Hans Magnus Enzensberger. Volume 4 was different. Here we had taken matters into our own hands and contacted the Frankfurt critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, venerated as the leading literary expert by some and despised as a venomous critic by others. On August 27, 1987, he wrote to FSB that he would be pleased to recommend a poet, "but first it was necessary to clarify, which funds could be made available for this project." In the course of a telephone call we agreed on "the famous starvation wage" of poets and received Peter Maiwald’s address in return. A year later, Maiwald presented two collections of poems to our company, one on a high literary plane – we called it “poems for adults”, and one of a lighter nature. We called this second one “poems for children” and decided to use it.

The basic concept of volume 4 was an – admittedly daring – parable. What poetry is to language, namely its most beautiful expression and adornment, is certainly in some way comparable to the position of a door handle on a big, naked wooden door leaf. But our ambition in this project went even further. With this Maiwald volume we set out to disprove the so-called “Enzensberger constant” according to which never more than 1354 copies could be sold of any poetry book (and therefore the publication of poetry books is no longer an economically viable proposition these days). FSB set out to refute this theory by publishing the “East Westphalian Relation of Fuzziness“, knowing full well that this collection of poetry by Peter Maiwald (as also happened to all other FSB Edition volumes) would find at least 6,000 buyers. Hans Magnus Enzensberger serenely admitted defeat, congratulating his colleague Peter Maiwald on this exquisite leporello.