The bookseller Walther König (January 12, 1939) comes from Münster, where his father Walther ran a paint store. His siblings included the entrepreneur Franz Wilhelm König, the architect Fritz König and the former director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Kasper König.
After starting out in Cologne in 1963, with an apprenticeship as a bookseller in the Bücherstube am Dom and an attempt to gain a foothold in New York in 1968, König founded the bookshop in Cologne in 1969 with little capital. Thanks to his good network in the Cologne art scene, which flourished at the end of the 1960s, his bookshop became a meeting place for artists. The distribution of the catalog for the exhibition Die Kunst der 60er Jahre at the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum contributed to the success of the early years. In the 1980s, the bookshop was visited almost daily by numerous artists (Albert Oehlen and Werner Büttner), gallery owners (Max Hetzler) and publishers (Benedikt Taschen). Today, it is considered one of the most important addresses for literature on contemporary art.