THE BOOK SHOPS ALONG THE SEINE RIVER IN PARIS

                                       

THE BOOK SHOPS  ALONG THE SEINE RIVER IN PARIS

has For roughly three kilometres of Paris, the stone parapets that flank the Seine are lined with dark-green metal boxes that unfold to reveal book stalls. These are the bouquinistes, and on any given day about 230 of them preside over some 900 boxes in total. Together they hold upwards of 300,000 items : second-hand books with cracked spines, yellowing magazines, vintage postcards, antique maps, engravings, and prints. Each vendor is granted precisely ten metres of railing, finished in the strictly regulated  wagon vert, or carriage green. If you fancy becoming one yourself, respect to wait: the list for a pitch currently runs to around eight years.

The custom stretches back to the 18th century, when itinerant sellers roamed the Pont Neuf with baskets of books slung over their arms. Their trade was perpetually precarious. City authorities banned them, chased them from the bridges, and accused them of trafficking in censored or seditious material. Yet the stalls proved stubborn. They were suppressed, then tolerated, then suppressed again, but never quite extinguished. The river kept calling the books back.

Revolution turned the stalls into something more than commerce. When presses were shuttered and pamphlets proscribed, the bouquinistes became one of the few places where uncensored writing still circulated. Centuries later, under the Nazi occupation, the paradox deepened: German soldiers would linger over volumes in the same hour that Resistance members used the boxes as letter drops. After the war, the vendors were finally permitted to leave their stalls in situ overnight. That concession gave the bouquinistes the permanent, weathered form we recognise today.

Their domain runs along both banks of the Seine. On the Left Bank, from the Quai Voltaire to the Quai du Louvre; on the Right, from the Pont Marie to the Quai du Louvre. The stalls create a continuous corridor that loops round the Île de la Cité and Île Saint-Louis, framing the river in literature. In 1991, UNESCO folded the entire stretch into its World Heritage designation for the banks of the Seine, acknowledging that the books are as integral to the landscape as the stone and the water.

So it remains the largest open-air bookshop in the world, but that hardly captures it. The bouquinistes are a living archive and a piece of civic theatre all at once. 

( Avtar Mota )

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