Book Shopping
In Paris there are limits to expansion in a growing store, since the architecture is precious and often protected. Some merchants have solved the problem by simply moving into the shop next door, and often the shop next door to that, and the one around the corner. What was once a department gets its own store. Au Vieux Campeur - the closest thing we have to an MEC (or an REI) - has eighteen addresses within a few blocks of each other just off Boulevard Saint-Germain. Skis are in one store; Scuba gear in another; Maps and guidebooks in another, and so on.
Gibert Jeune is the closest thing we have to a Chapters or an Indigo (or a Barnes & Noble). It has a total of eight locations clustered around the Place Saint-Michel (plus one on the right bank near the big department stores): fiction in one multi-level store, language books are across the street, next door to several addresses of scholarly non-fiction, and around the corner are the school books. There are no comfy chairs and no coffee shop inside but there are many floors of all varieties of the printed page. I can never find a chair in Indigo anyway; it's the books that make it a pleasant place to spend a couple of hours on a Saturday.
The excuse for this visit was an urgent need for a French-English dictionary. Janet will be spending next week in French classes, and the four we already have were either too large or too small; we needed to get one that was ju-u-ust right. And to aid my studies, we came away with an edition of Edgar Allen Poe's Murders in the Rue Morgue printed in both English and French, page by page.
posted 27.8.06
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