Paris sketches-Second hand booksellers along the quays

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As soon they arrive they open the closed booths. They come whenever they like, whenever their feeling is that the books must enrich the world. The leave whenever they have has it, whenever it pleases them. Without them the quays along the Seine would be dumb, mute, blind and deaf. The booksellers seldom laugh or even smile, look sometimes very grim and are very cautious about their goods. The booksellers who do well wrap their treasured books in plastic wrappings, like you would see meat packed in supermarkets. And they even go further in their precautions! In the centre of their books they put signboard nobody can miss:” Look, ask, but DON’T touch the books!” The resigned, punished browser just has to look hastily, hands on his back, on the old, used and worn out book titles. The enjoyments of touching the books, making a silent dialog between the books and the human possible, are forbidden here.

But not all are sentries of a fortified castle. Not all booksellers take away the daily joint of the bibliophiles. In the small booths of these “merchants of spiritual goods” which were so valuable and necessary to Anatole France, an experienced eye can still find genuine cardboard bookbindings, romantic publisher bindings, in maroquin or other precious leather.  But the professional bookseller gets a real heartache when a profanation hand of a badly behaving tourist, plays around with the precious cover of an old Voltaire book.