The Bookstores of Paris
A walking tour of the French capital through the books within it
When I moved to France in 2020, I made a point of entering every bookstore I came across. A quixotic project, perhaps, but I found it strangely worthwhile. During a year in which everyone was forced into solitary confinement, the chance to browse a shop filled with books and paraphernalia was one I didn’t take lightly.
You see, a bookstore isn’t like most stores, where you walk in, hand over money, and walk out. It’s more like a contemporary museum, with artifacts in the form of books. When you’re browsing the rows of shelves, you always feel a sense that, somehow, some unknown sentence printed in ink could change your life forever. There’s an acknowledgement that books have a mysterious depth to them — and that no matter how long you spend looking through them, there will always be a book out there that eludes you, but whose contents you’ve been dying to read your whole life.
It’s this intoxicating sense of possibility, I think, that makes bookstores such great places to visit. So it’s just as well that Paris has so many of them. I don’t think I’ve been to any other city where you can spend so many hours picking up books and flicking through their pages without feeling obliged to buy them.
