A French revolution of a bookish sort

Paris is taking up arms to preserve its reputation as a bastion of literary culture

By Susan Sachs
Paris — From Saturday's Globe and Mail

For more than 30 years, Marie-Jo Grandjean has spent her days and many of her nights amid the organized clutter of her tiny Left Bank shop where art books crowd every available surface and shelf right up to the high ceiling.

Infused with that distinctive smell of fragile paper and old bindings, the store has been her life. But she always worried, she said, whether it would live on without her. In the past decade, five other independent booksellers within blocks of her shop have shut their doors, victims of rising rents and rapid gentrification.

The story is the same across the historic Latin Quarter, with its zigzag streets, medieval university buildings and, increasingly, big brand-name clothing stores. In 2000, according to a survey by the city of Paris, the district boasted 300 independent bookstores, many of them quirky specialty shops. Now, there are just 170.

In a city that thinks of itself as a capital of culture, the decline is seen as a full-fledged emergency.

To reverse the trend and revive the small bookseller tradition, Paris has taken on the role of landlord – but a landlord with a one-track mind. Through one of its redevelopment agencies, the city has been buying up property and commercial leases in the Latin Quarter and renting them to bookstores.

Ms. Grandjean, who opened Courant d'Art in the late 1970s after abandoning her dream of being a flamenco dancer, is one of the first to benefit from the project. Last year, she decided she needed cash to help care for her elderly mother. But she feared that if she sold the store, a new landlord would ultimately convert it into a high-rent boutique. Instead, the city bought the shop and now rents it back to her at a below-market rate.

More important, in her eyes and that of the city, the terms of the sale specified that the space will never be used for anything other than a bookstore, no matter who leases it.

“It's extraordinary, what they're doing, isn't it?” said Ms. Grandjean, who presides over an inventory of about 100,000 rare and old art and photography books. “It allows people to stay in touch with culture, and culture to be transmitted to people.”
The full report here. Great story.