In early fall of 2025, my family and I spent a weekend in Rochester, MN, and I took the opportunity to visit Garden Party Books, an independent bookstore in the northern part of the city.
Owners Anna and Andy Smith opened the shop in 2021: 
Whenever I travel for work, I try to sneak in a bookshop visit—or three. So when a conference brought me to Augusta, GA, I made a beeline for the independent bookstore in town and pulled a small posse of fellow book lovers along with me. Five of us walked in; twenty-three books and several tote bags later, we walked out grinning like kids at summer camp.
There’s something electric about entering a bookshop with friends. The “Ohh!”s and “Aahh!”s, the rapid-fire recommendations, the whispered “You have to read this”- it all echoed through The Book Tavern that afternoon. 
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.
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