At the upscale wine bar and restaurant Lutter & Wegner, the manager, Sasha-Michael Gruel, smiled at Mr. Bleck as he came in. “Anyone who comes to Berlin, or lives here, they recognize he belongs to traditional Berlin,” Mr. Gruel said.

While it is not entirely clear that everyone who buys a paper from Mr. Bleck ever reads it, Ulf Poschardt, editor in chief of Die Welt, is happy that Mr. Bleck now sells his exclusively. “I was always fascinated by him,” said Mr. Poschardt, who said he always buys a copy from the poet when he sees him, but has never told Mr. Bleck that he actually runs the newspaper.

“We all know the future is digital,” he said. “ But people like him show all the romanticism of old journalism. He makes this effort we put into our newspaper really poetic.”

Poetry initially played only a small role in Mr. Bleck’s life. He won a poetry prize as a teenager in East Germany, but he dropped out of a poetry club out of boredom and moved on to other things.

Trained to operate an offset printing press, he became so nervous before his qualifying test that he failed. Later, having passed the test, he found the work unbearably dull. “If you’re creative, it’s really monotonous,” he said.

Mr. Bleck began by selling newspapers part time. His first night on the job, he sold only 20. “The guy I was working for said, ‘That won’t do!’” Then Mr. Bleck remembered the Christmas poems he had to recite as a child before he could receive his presents. “I decided to make a poem, out of desperation,” he said. It worked, and his unusual career began.