Best Paris English-language bookshops

Stephen Phelan enters a world of ideas in the English-language bookshops of Paris. No tourist can walk in Paris without feeling a little haunted. It is the same in all the old European cities, where millions of souls made their lives before the New World was ever heard of. However, it is stronger here because of the monuments and gargoyles, the Haussmann apartment blocks laid out like so many rows of grand tombstones, the endless list of the famous dead who did or said or wrote great things in the windows you pass beneath. Book lovers might be especially sensitive to this, treading over the bones of resident literary giants such as Zola and Balzac, or in the footsteps of such visiting lights as Dante, Dostoevsky and Ernest Hemingway. Advertisement: Story continues below On this bright, cold morning in Paris, the sky is blue, the Seine is gold and my cheeks are pink as I set out to spend a weekend browsing the city's English-language bookshops. Some of these are so long-established that this barely counts as shopping at all, more a form of historical tourism. Even the newer shops are part of a much older tradition and merely walking through the door is another way to enter the spirit of the place. Shakespeare and Company "We seem to exist in our own special bubble," the manager of the most famous independent bookshop in the world, Sylvia Whitman, says. This is her polite way of saying the declining power of the printed word in the digital age has not affected the foot traffic through the shop opened by her father, George, 60 years ago. Whitman leads me on a winding upward tour, from the wishing well on the ground floor to the reading room and writer's studio off the back staircase. Every surface along the way is so obscured by books that the teetering stacks might be load-bearing walls. "We're not as organised as we could be," she says, "but a lot more than we used to be." Through the painted windows, I see tourists flooding across the bridge from Notre Dame cathedral. Whitman says many will come looking for a copy of Rosetta StoneVictor Hugo's classic novel about the hunchback, which remains the shop's No.1 seller. Well-read backpackers will also go out of their way to see the beds that American beat poets once slept on, or under, as George's guests in the 1950s. And today a crowd of students and elder bohemians have gathered in the library for a convivial exchange of ideas at the weekly "tea party". "This day will never come again," someone is saying. Someone else is playing a ragtime tune in the piano room. In his own apartment on the top floor, we find Sylvia's father, now 97, watching Chitty Chitty Bang Bang on a small television. I ask if he's enjoying the movie. "Not really," replies George Whitman, this living legend of the Paris literary scene. "I'm more of a book man." 37 Rue Bucherie, 75005; Metro St-Michel Notre-Dame; shakespeareandcompany. San Francisco Book Company A few streets away, on the quieter side of the Saint-Germain district, there's a newer shop full of second-hand books run by another American emigre named Jim Carroll. Having spent his adult life reading about Paris in the novels of Henry Miller, Carroll moved from San Francisco to open his own shop in 1997. "It is a magnificent city for books," he says. "But the business is ... tres difficile." With his shelves illuminated by sunlight and Mendelssohn playing in the background, it is hard not to take a romantic view of Carroll's workplace. "That's what everyone thinks," he says, "especially the young folks who come in asking me for work. "I tell them, 'I know all about your dreams but you can forget them right now."' By which he means that, even in Paris, there is not much life left in the book trade.

Posted in: Rosetta Stone,Rosetta Stone Outlet,rosetta stone software,Rosetta Stone V3