Taking a cue from Edmund White, that most dedicated of flâneurs, and heeding the advice of Muriel Spark – “when in trouble, go to Paris” – I decamped with my husband for a few days to the city of lights. Although we were more likely to be found asleep by the time the dazzling display of illuminations fully lit the night sky, that didn’t worry us much. As a colleague says he has learned, thanks to his worldly-wise wife, one of the main reasons to go to Paris is to wander, and sit in cafes, parks and bars, and watch the world go past. Also, I should add, to dive down side streets into its most astonishing wealth of bookshops. No wonder we were worn out by the end of day. From right bank to left, we must have walked miles between shelves as high as the Grand Canyon. I can personally attest that there are still many more books on sale than macarons in this most enlightened of capitals, and some of them cheaper too.
We arrived equipped with an iPad’s worth of reading, and for once were restrained in our buying. I was already deep in Henry James’s The Europeans, which seemed appropriate for such a trip. This comedy of American provincialism and prejudice – on both sides of the Atlantic – may have been written in a period whose customs are unimaginable today, but on a superficial level at least some of its insights remain sound. I was pleased, nevertheless, to see a young American couple speaking French to their children, at a cafe table next to ours (“My husband is a francophone,” his wife confided, as if such behaviour needed to be excused).
In case of battery failure, I also had the French novelist Paul Fournel’s novel, Dear Reader (Puskin, £10) in my bag. This is a shrewd and delightful satire, which I recommend unreservedly, about an old-style publisher, from Saint Germain des Pres, who feels obliged to embrace the digital age. He does so with justifiable trepidation since it threatens to interfere with his long boozy lunches and weekends in the country spent with manuscripts, which are far better company than a cold screen.
All this, however, is to digress from the charms of Paris’s [ital]librairies[ital], which we set about exploring with the devotion such emporia deserve. What first strikes you is not their abundance, but how seriously they take their job. Stationery is discreetly consigned to the sides, like dust swept under the carpet. Almost every inch is devoted to books, up to the rafters, and the staff’s expressions resemble librarians of yore. Readers are silent, and stand for ages, leafing. And the books are gorgeous: sombrely styled, elegant, on quality paper, and properly priced so that one need not fear for the writer starving in the garret overhead.
Not only are there countless stores, but many are specialist, dedicated to art or gardens, animals or film. While a promising English-language second-hand shop proved disappointingly grubby and unexciting, there were places where the discovery of an excellent bookshop was an unexpected pleasure. The space given to works on photography and film in the Jeu du Paume art gallery, for instance, would make any Scottish gallery’s book collection blush for shame. Nor were most of these coffee table tomes. The majority were as frivolous as a PhD thesis.
It is clear that France still treats books and readers with tremendous respect. Yet to the French, even this citadel of culture is crumbling. Paul Fournel’s jaundiced publisher finds more comfort in London’s Charing Cross Road than in the whole of Paris. Yet for all the excellent bookshops on this side of the channel, or north of Hadrian’s Wall, one cannot be accused of seeing la vie en rose to acknowledge that we simply cannot begin to compete with Paris, either in the number of booksellers, nor in the quality and range of what they offer.
As Fournel’s hero wisely reflects, however, “Literary publishing has never been in crisis because literary publishing is a crisis.” Balzac’s despairing heroes would agree. The truth is, it has always been so. And so one begins to wonder if, in fact, it is an inbuilt, perhaps even a necessary trait among readers, but especially among writers, to feel the literary world is against them. Happiness, after all, writes white, and the blank page fills no publisher’s catalogue or bookshop, unless it’s the stationery carousels.
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