Paris in July is a strange, beautiful contradiction. The city is at its sun-drenched best, but half the locals seem to vanish. Those who remain - especially behind bookshop counters - carry the unmistakable air of people who drew the short straw and now have to deal with us tourists in 95-degree (35 degrees Celsius) heat. I lived here in my early twenties, and on this Bastille Day return, the nostalgia hit fast: the packed métro, the sounds and smells of screeching trains at Gare de l’Est, and the luxury that is a simple Parisian breakfast: tartine, café crème and fresh orange juice. But this time, I’d come with a mission: to trace a sliver of Paris’s English-language literary history and visit four very different independent bookshops that still carry the city’s bookish soul. Before we dive into the crawl, let’s acknowledge the giant in the room (or on the Seine): Shakespeare & Company. After reading “The Paris Bookseller” by Kerri Maher in the spring of 2025, the idea of making Paris one of my stops for #40BookshopsUnder40 took root and did not let me go until I booked tickets for a 48-hour trip. With high hopes for experiencing Sylvia Beach’s legacy, the reality was… a line of book-shopping tourists wrapping around the block and signs warning “No photos inside.” It felt more like a theme park than a literary refuge. After learning so much about Sylvia Beach’s original 1922 shop and George Whitman’s reincarnation of it (1951) I wasn’t quite willing to queue for the Instagram version. So I kept walking. Lucky for me, Paris still has bookshops full of heart, and fewer selfie sticks. La Mouette Rieuse: A Haven in the Marais Mayhem By late morning, the Marais had turned into a sweltering neighborhood of heat, tourists, and teenagers hunting iced lattes. I ducked into a shady little park, the Jardin des Rosiers-Joseph Migneret, just long enough to reclaim my sanity. That’s when I noticed a Little Free Library holding not one, but two German books I’d been curious about, including a title by Saša Stanišić, whom I’d accidentally met on my Hamburg Indie bookshop crawl. A sign, surely. Then I looked up and realized I was sitting behind a three-story bookshop I’d never heard of: La Mouette Rieuse. From the outside, you might mistake it for your typical Marais concept store. La Mouette Reiuse translates to “laughing seagull”, which gives little indication of what to expect inside. Inside, it’s a bright, delightful concept-bookstore. The first floor bursts with a generous book selection (and sizeable English book section), tasteful, French-made prints, cards and souvenirs - zero plastic Eiffel Towers, I promise. Scrabble-letter signage marks the different sections, and the English-language collection is surprisingly robust. Upstairs: • A children’s paradise on the second floor. • A co-working space on the third floor (€6/hour, €20/day) I ended up in the sunlit sunporch café with a strict “no computers or tablets” rule. Instead, I watched people talk to each other or get lost in the pages of whatever book was in front of them. The room hummed with a quiet, screen-free presence. After a day in the chaos of Paris in July, this felt like an exhale. La Mouette Rieuse wasn’t on my itinerary, but it became the highlight of this Indie bookshop crawl. Galignani: The Grande Dame of English Books in ParisIf La Mouette Rieuse is warm and playful, Galignani is her elegant, intimidating older cousin.  Established by a Venetian family of printers who became literary fixtures in Paris, Galignani proudly calls itself “the first English bookshop on the continent.” The store’s history, chronicled in its own materials, reads like a trans-European love letter to bookmaking and intellectual life. Stepping inside, the tone shifts immediately: high ceilings, perfect shelf lighting, soft classical music, and signs that politely, but firmly, request shoppers not to speak loudly. The booksellers maintain the kind of cool, aloof professionalism that could be read as snobbery, or simply being very Parisian. I couldn’t decide. What won me over was the curation: a sweeping English-language collection that takes up half the store, including sections I rarely see elsewhere: Korean literature, Middle Eastern writers, Scandinavian translations, literary criticism, European union policy, high-tech economics, and more. It's like browsing the private library of a well-traveled academic. I overheard a British customer ask where the social sciences were, and the response was a crisp, “Non.” And nothing further. Fair enough. Still, I left with Ordinary Love by Marie Rutkoski and the satisfying feeling that Galignani is exactly what it claims to be: high-end, exquisitely curated, and serious about its books. San Francisco Book Company: A Charming, Chaotic Paperback Cave On the Left Bank, tucked into a narrow passage near Odéon, you’ll find San Francisco Book Company, a used-book labyrinth that feels like it’s held together by good intentions and overstuffed shelves. Floor-to-ceiling books. Narrow aisles. Slightly uneven flooring. It’s a cave for treasure hunters: the kind of place where you could lose an hour trying to figure out whether the “New Arrivals” shelf actually contains new arrivals or simply newly shelved old fiction (I’m still not sure). Their collection ranges widely: fiction, poetry, art history, music, academic works, and esoteric curiosities. Prices aren’t always the bargains you might hope for - Paris rent is Paris rent - but their selection is massive for a used English-language shop. The bookseller barely looked up from his computer, which honestly felt on-brand. I walked out empty-handed but certain this place has gems, just not for the faint of heart or the mildly claustrophobic. The Red Wheelbarrow : Small Things Matter Just across from the Luxembourg Gardens sits The Red Wheelbarrow, a long-standing anglophone bookshop with adjoining storefronts: one for children’s books (The Red Balloon), one for poetry and events, and one for general fiction and nonfiction. On the day I visited, the shop was steady and pleasant, though I found myself wishing for a little more spark from behind the counter. A few months after the visit, however, I had a chance to briefly catch up with its founder and owner, Penelope Fletcher. And the picture filled in with much more depth. Penelope has been a bookseller nearly her entire adult life: I originally opened my first bookstore at age nineteen, in Canada. I moved to Paris in 1990 and I opened The Red Wheelbarrow Bookstore in 2001 in the Marais, in Paris. That bookstore closed in 2012 and we reopened in 2018 on the Left Bank. This long arc of experience shows in the shop’s sensibility. The wooden floors, rolling ladders, and warm, tightly curated shelves are intentional, not quaint. As Penelope puts it: The Red Wheelbarrow and the Red Balloon on rue de Médicis are traditional, independent, anglophone bookstores in Paris with wooden ladders and wooden floors, a place where you will find the books of James Baldwin and Gertrude Stein, as well as contemporary writers such as Yasmin Zaher and Janet Skeslien Charles. And while my visit fell on a quiet summer afternoon, the shop is far from sleepy. Penelope shared that they regularly host author events and celebrations. We often have events with authors, such as book launches and book signings in the shop or in other places. And we love when authors come in and find their books on our shelves or tables and when people meet their favourite authors. Knowing this, I can imagine a very different energy pulsing through the shop on an event night. The bones are there: the history, the community, the commitment to both classic and contemporary voices. My timing simply didn’t catch the Red Wheelbarrow at its most vibrant. Even so, its presence across from the gardens, with its ladders, floorboards, and deep literary roots, makes it a meaningful stop on any Paris bookshop wander. Penelope's recommendations
Paris Isn’t Sylvia Beach’s Paris. And That’s Okay.A hundred years ago, Sylvia Beach opened Shakespeare & Company into a Paris where writers like Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce wandered in, argued over prose, borrowed books, and sometimes forgot to return, or pay, them. Obviously, the city has changed, commercialized, and grown heavier under its own mythology. Walking through today’s Paris with her story fresh in my mind, it struck me that expecting to find remnants of that world is both unrealistic and unnecessary. Bookshops aren’t time capsules; they evolve with the people who run them and the readers who show up. They adapt, shift, and - sometimes - become a little grumpy during Bastille Day weekend. And that’s part of the charm. What I found on this two-day crawl wasn’t the ghost of the Lost Generation but a snapshot of Paris’s current bookish ecosystem: • a serene refuge above the chaos of the Marais, • an aristocratic institution that still takes books seriously, • a used-book cave for the true treasure hunters, • and a garden-side indie doing its best on a blistering July afternoon. And of course, these are only four of the countless bookshops scattered across the city. Paris is dense with literary nooks, and there was no way I could reach them all in 48 hours. Not even close. I barely scratched the surface. If you know of an independent bookshop in Paris that I should visit (ideally, with a German or English seciton), please let me know: Modern-day Paris doesn’t need to mimic Sylvia Beach’s world to be worth exploring. The bookshops that exist now reflect this era: its tastes, its tensions, its mix of locals and tourists, its heatwaves, its quiet corners of refuge. They’re imperfect, eclectic, sometimes aloof, often delightful. And they’re still here.
In a city that constantly reinvents itself, that alone feels like a small literary victory. Comments are closed.
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