The Aardvark Blog

Bookshops in France
25/07/2013

 Lis Tes Ratures is a stylish bookshop in Nantes on the Loire. French bookshops seem to be able to charge so much more for second hand and rare books, and they still have retail price control for new books. Wonderful bindings in the window, and a beautiful position just by the castle made it a dream of a bookshop!

On an earlier trip to France, in Burgundy we came across a bookshop that had café tables spread throughout the bookshelves, and that gave us the idea to open a café at Aardvark. For a while I wanted to call it Les Bouquinistes in honour of the dealers who sell books on the banks of the Seine, but when I raised the idea with Ed he was violently against it. It was only a year or two later that I discovered that he had misheard me and had thought that I had suggested 'book and eats'. 

On another holiday in Troyes, between Champagne and Burgundy, I came across a bookshop called LES LIVRES RETROUVES and became obsessed with changing our name to 'Books Found and Refound'. Again, nothing came of this, which is just as well because ideas never seem to translate quite right from French to English.