LITERARY LANDSCAPES PARIS

Paris is famous for its art and art bookshops, and Bibliophile struggled to resist this beautiful temptation of a book! The most iconic bookshops such as Delamain or Galignani have passionate booksellers with a vocation to open new horizons to readers and these bookshops feel a little bit like a social club. Sound familiar? The role of bookshops was so essential during the pandemic lockdowns that books were considered an essential need and bookshops were allowed to stay open alongside food shops and pharmacies. Food for thought. Like all of us, Parisians cannot resist stopping at a box of books put out in front of a bookshop. The name of the City of Paris evokes many stories from Notre-Dame de Paris by Victor Hugo and also as a refuge for authors who fled prejudice, like Oscar Wilde, Richard Wright and James Baldwin. From the oldest café in Paris, Le Procope, where philosopher Voltaire had his desk, to the Shakespeare & Co. bookshop where so many Americans come on pilgrimage in the footsteps of the Beat Generation, to green book stalls punctuating the banks of the River Seine, you'll be drawn to Paris after reading this book, if only from your armchair, with these delightfully engaging colour photographs on every page. Currently hosting the 2024 Olympics, the City of Light is here explored in a cultural odyssey of its historic bookshops, restaurants and the haunts of writers who have made Paris their home. For example the Drouant restaurant which is inextricably linked with the Goncourt Literary Prize, Le Döme at 108 Boulevard du Montparnasse where occultist Aleister Crowley, artist Paul Gauguin and Vladimir Lenin frequented, and follow in the footsteps of Paul Verlaine whose new poetry was published in a weekly review from the nightclub Le Chat Noir and despite an ongoing addiction to absinth was voted 'Prince of Poets' in 1894. The prolific author and self publicist Georges Simenon wrote his Inspector Maigret novels here and added to the glitterati literati list are Marcel Proust, Molière, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Alxandre Dumas, Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre and many more and the places they knew and loved like theatres, Parisian alleyways, the opera house and the riverside booksellers who have been in business in one form or another since the 16th century. We love this book. 160 landscape format pages, packed with colour photos, 23 x 19.6 cm.