First Installment of Paris: Bookshops

Full disclosure: I didn't go to the Eiffel tower.
I did go to three English bookshops and a couple French ones, several fabric shops, and a piano and cello concert at La Sainte-Chapelle. I ate real French macarons from Ladurée, and six kinds of crêpes (and to be honest, a crêpe without Nutella is not that great).
And Marissa and I ate at the same Japanese restaurant three times. I'm not ashamed.

I put my cup of maple-syruped coffee down to browse the books overflowing from a cave in Paris. Not like I'm in paradise or anything, just The Abbey Bookshop.

During the first few days of the trip, I felt pressure to do and see everything. There is so much to experience in Paris. In fact, there is no end to Paris. And these six days weren't just vacation; we had required field trips and gallery visits. I'm not complaining, mind you, because I went on field trips in Paris. I'm just saying. The #1 way to guarantee a dissatisfying trip to Paris is to think it will be your only chance to experience all the city has to offer. I realized this on Thursday, so instead of wallowing in adventurer's anxiety, I did the things I love.

One of the places I was most excited for in Paris was Shakespeare & Co. bookstore. It sits on the left bank of the Seine near the Notre Dame, with chess tables outside as well as upstairs in the reading room. I heard The Tallest Man on Earth playing from the front desks, and someone practicing the theme from Amelie on the piano upstairs. Shakespeare & Co. has nooks to sit and read and write, and history of nurturing writers. In keeping with its bohemian-intellectual feel, it houses a few young writers in cots upstairs, so long as they work in the shop and read a book a day. The most famous writers who stayed here are Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and Gertrude Stein. It has become a kind of pilgrimage place, with the walls of a nook upstairs covered in layers of notes and pictures left by visitors. It's a bit "touristy," as much as I hate saying that word as if it lowers the shop's value. It draws visitors for good reason.

One wall in the main room of the shop is devoted to common books that travelers come specifically to Shakespeare & Co. for: Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast, for example, or James Joyce's Ulysses, which was published by the shop's founder when no other publisher would touch it. When you buy a book there, the young writers working put an official "Shakespeare & Co. - Kilometer Zero" stamp inside the cover.

photo by Marissa

reading room, photo by Marissa

outside the window upstairs, photo by Marissa

I explored the shop, read a couple chapters of a book in the reading room, wrote in my journal and argued with myself about how many fifteen-Euro books I could justify buying when Half Price Books is waiting with open arms for my return in five weeks. I settled on two, then left the shop feeling small. Shakespeare & Co. is as much about its own history and ideology as it is about literature. After spending time among its shelves, around all the notes and little idiosyncratic marks other literature-lovers have left, you feel like just another person who loves something much, much bigger than yourself. It's not a bad feeling; you simply are aware of your own smallness.

photo by Marissa

The next day, however, I found The Abbey Bookshop. Where Shakespeare & Co. says, "We welcome strangers, we nurture writers, we have a history in the literary world," and so on, The Abbey Bookshop says, "We love books."

The place is filled with books. They make the shelves sag. They're piled precariously on every surface but a narrow walkway. They overflow not only from their shelves but from boxes and a cave downstairs. It can seem overwhelming, but in the way the view from the top of a mountain at sunrise is overwhelming. And like at sunrise, there's coffee to drink. The shop owner always has free coffee for you (or tea towards the end of the day) with maple syrup or brown sugar on a tray half-hidden in a mountain of books. And if you're looking for something specific, Brian (said provider of coffee and books) knows where it is, or will get it for you, because it might be in one of the shelves revealed when the one in front of it is rolled aside (yeah, this place is that magical).

I should also mention that the Abbey is the first bookstore I've ever been to with more than one of Rumi's texts. In the States, I looked for Rumi at every bookstore I visited for months (and when I finally found one, I wondered why I hadn't just bought it online). Even at Shakespeare & Co., there were two copies of The Penguin Classics' Selected Writings of Rumi. At the Abbey, there were multiple translations of multiple texts. This, my friends, is the mark of a bookshop that knows what's up.

Also, The Abbey Bookshop organizes hikes in the surrounding countryside, which is one of the items on my list of reasons why I should live in Paris for a while.

I also went to an English bookshop called Village Voice. It was pleasant, and spacious compared to the other shops. It has less character but a good selection; it's a straight-forward bookshop, and is probably the best place to go if you're an English-reader looking for a brand new release.

When I bought Teilhard de Chardin's "The Divine Milieu" there, the cashier commented that it had been on the shelf for a long time, because the price on the inside cover was still in Francs instead of Euros.
The next day I went back to the Abbey Bookshop.

Books I Purchased in Paris

Clockwise from top left: Abbey, Abbey, Abbey, Shakespeare, Village Voice, other French shops.

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