Les Librairies dans le monde is a book on bookshops all over the world (the French word “librairie” means bookshop, not library, which is “bibliothèque” in French) that brings together the best of two worlds. It is a lavishly illustrated work, with many gorgeous full page pictures of sometimes mythical, sometimes lesser known, sometimes simply breathtaking places (number one is undoubtedly the Space Odyssey-like Zongshuge bookshop in Shenzhen, close to Hong Kong; but who doesn’t know the Lello bookshop in Porto, the London Foyles, the Gibert Joseph chain in France, or the City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco?). In addition, it is also an illuminating commentary and analysis by two French specialists of book history, Jean-Yves Mollier and Patricia Sorel, whose interest in the economic and political aspects of publishing history guarantees a broad perspective, allowing them to address bookshops as more than just the brick and mortar aspect of the book trade.  

This broad perspective concerns time as well as space. Although Mollier and Sorel limit themselves to bookshops, either new or old, that are actually in business; their study pays great attention to the history of the bookshop in general and the history of concrete bookshops in particular. The authors discuss not only the relationships between selling and buying physical goods bus also a wide range of related activities and professions, such as the material production of books before and after print, the specificities of editing and publishing in relationship with the bookshop, the overlap between bookshop and loan library, and various cultural, political, social and leisurely events and goings-on that appear in, around and thanks to bookshops. This multi-perspectival approach is then continued in the presentation of all venues discussed in the book: 5 continents, 40 countries, approximately 100 lavishly illustrated bookshops, with in total some 250 mentioned in the commentaries. Mollier and Sorel must have had a difficult task in making a representative and stimulating selection. It would of course be narrow-minded to reproach the absence each reader’s favorite bookshop, since their choices do cover already a very large spectrum, making room for places and countries that one does not necessarily expect next to the already mentioned flagships of the profession. For each store, the authors offer a careful description of the history of the place, including the material characteristics of each venue: architecture, location, square meters, number of titles on shelf, in store or in the warehouse, ownership and staff, marketing policies and, very welcomely, the proper orientation of each shop as reflected in the type of books on display and their match with the soul or spirit of each individual business. All these presentations are at the same time extremely well-documented and persuasively written, which does not come as a surprise given the high-quality selection made by Mollier and Sorel and the great quality of the illustrations. The wrapper of the book highlighting Lello on the front and Zongshuge at the back functions as a kind of Arch of Triumph opening the doors to a wonderful journey. Only once in a while one will find some very small critical observations, such as in the comparison between the newest creation of the Zongshuge chain and its Pekin competitor, Xidan, whose modern style architecture is described as equally “bigger than life” but less audacious than that of the starship style of the Zongshuge space in Shenzhen (Xidan’s “superego” looks more into the direction of the library than of the bookshop, even if both models are not always easy to tell from each other). In all cases, after reading this book, any city traveler cannot but include the local bookshops in the program of the week or weekend. From now on, it should be almost impossible from now on to skip the local bookshops in any tour of the kind (readers of this review are however kindly requested to avoid the queue at Lello in Portugal, which moreover asks an entrance fee: the pictures of this book will do).

Librairies dans le monde is also a very serious analysis of an institution that is currently under strong pressure. The superb venues showcased in the book and the creation of new bookshops in more than one country (but certainly not in all of them) do not prevent the authors to examine the serious problems of today’s bookshops. The menaces are countless and well known: the Covid-19 pandemic, obviously, but also Amazon, the sky-rocketing real estate prices and increasing salary costs, the decline of print literacy and the rise of other nonbook media (cinema, television, internet), the cost of books and the reduced purchasing power in many countries, censorship (not only in Islamic countries), and last but not least the difficulties to maintain the core business of bookselling after the blurring of boundaries between high and low culture, the bookshop being in danger of becoming a small corner in the department store or even nothing else than an alibi to have a pleasant coffee-break with no book-buying between two other shopping experiences, all these changes jeopardize the future of the brick and mortar shop. These phenomena are not new, and the bookshops have proven to be capable of adapting themselves to new contexts and circumstances. Mollier and Sorel systematically discuss for instance the way in which bookshops have opened their shelves and tables to paperbacks, initially kept out of their initially elitist sanctuaries, and one could easily add the example of the Tik Tok bookstores. Their analysis does however not fall prey to naïve optimism (A personal anecdote, if allowed: I vividly remember a visit to a university bookshop in downtown Atlanta, which sold nothing else than baseball caps, sweatshirts and computers, and it would be silly to deny that this evolution is just a pre-MAGA symptom.) The authors do not document this threatening evolution, but they certainly refuse to cover it up.  

The general message of this book is nevertheless one of optimism. Bookshops are magnificent places and a key dimension of culture. But they can only do what they aim to do when seen and managed as more than just venues for selling books. Their economic, social, and political dimensions are no less important, and it is the successful convergence of all these dimensions that make the bookshop an essential agent in the making of a community, a society, and why not also a world.