»What role can literature play in European relations? The answer can be summed up in a single sentence: Literature provides an opportunity to explore the many faces of normality that people who speak a different language and who live in a different region experience.» Literature and book culture serve as a form of identification for European values and enable a formation of national and individual identities. Yet book culture is a difficult concept to grasp. To describe European book culture is to generalize the individual national manifestations of book culture. Such a dscription must start with a definition of the two components of book culture: culture and the book.