The richness of Paris’s reputation as a centre of literary creation veers close to being a trope. It was here, in 1791, that one of the first-ever copyright laws, designed to protect authors, was enacted. From Notre Dame de Paris to Les Misérables, the capital is also the setting of many of French literature’s best-known exports.

With its 400 bookshops, Paris has succeeded not only in ensuring their survival but enabling them to thrive as the economy of bookselling has undergone a transformation around the world. Ultra-competitive pricing from online marketplaces and skyrocketing commercial real-estate leases have combined to put bookshops in major cities in a difficult spot. But booksellers in Paris have two key advantages.

The first is France’s “Loi Lang”, named after president Francois Mitterrand’s culture minister, Jack Lang. This 1981 legislation, originally intended to protect independent bookshops from aggressive wholesaler pricing, outlawed discounts of more than five per cent on new releases, ensuring equal book prices nationwide. So even in the age of online retail, France is the country with the most bookshops per capita and is home to 3,500 independent bookshops. The second policy is one for which Parisian booksellers have former mayor Bertrand Delanoë to thank. The city of Paris started buying up Latin Quarter real estate with the objective of leasing it to bookshops at below market rate. The city is now landlord to 25 per cent of all bookshops across Paris.

Here, we visit 10 bookshops that exemplify Paris’s literary prowess. From preserving 15th-century manuscripts to feeding the appetite for bandes dessinées, these are the stores turning over new pages in the city’s literary history. — L

Karl Lagerfeld’s voracious appetite for books was legendary. One story involves his chauffeur loading up a car full of books after the fashion designer visited a single bookshop. It seemed only natural, then, for Lagerfeld to start his own bookstore, 7L, at number seven Rue de Lille in 1999.

While the studio housing his personal book collection is sadly not open to the public, the bookshop at the front of the building offers one of Paris’s sleekest collections of coffee-table books on the visual arts, from architecture to street photography. Booksellers at 7L also offer a service that builds collections for clients seeking to fill shelves with works in tune with their personal literary and aesthetic interests.

After Lagerfeld’s death in 2019, Chanel acquired 7L and has big plans for its book club, the Salon 7L. It meets on the first Wednesday of every month for readings and cultural events as diverse as its founder’s artistic pursuits. “I wanted 7L to continue being a place of living creation, celebrating Karl Lagerfeld’s love of books and photography,” Laurence Delamare, 7L’s director, tells monocle.
librairie7l.com

Date founded: 1999
Recommended book: Journal d’un Peintre suivi de Lettres Provencales (selected writings of arts patron Marie Laure de Noailles)
Number of titles: 2,500

Of the handful of Parisian bookshops that have been open for more than 100 years, La Procure on Place Saint- Sulpice might be the most successful today. Originally a supplier of goods to the Catholic church – from pews to pipe organs – La Procure has become the European leader on religious books, with a thriving network of 26 shops and franchises across France.

When monocle visits, Elie Khonde, a priest from the Democratic Republic of Congo, is stocking up on volumes to take home after completing a summer seminary near Paris. But, over time, La Procure has expanded beyond prayer books, religious art and sculpture. More than half of the shop’s space is dedicated to a general audience, from political memoirs to bandes dessinées.

“We might advise others against it but we will order any book a customer requests,” says La Procure’s ceo, Thomas Jobbé-Duval, (pictured above). “It’s in bookshops, including ours, that the diversity of points of view is best fostered. We are almost the opposite of social media. Rather than narrowing down viewpoints, we facilitate openness and exchange.”
laprocure.com

Date founded: 1919
Other items on sale: Groceries made in monasteries or convents
Annual turnover: €8m

Librairie Paul Jammes is not the place for you to pick up an ephemeral beach read. Instead, every rare book inside is a piece of our collective history. The shop, which specialises in rare tomes and typography, proves that these objects aren’t a thing of the past – the digital world has made them more important.

Esther Jammes, (pictured above), is the fourth generation of Jammes booksellers to take over the family business. When monocle visits, she picks up a 1485 vellum astronomy book detailing lunar and solar eclipses in colour – its glaring red and yellow charts as bright as they must have been 500 years ago. Nearby, a statue of Gutenberg gazes approvingly at a printing press from the era of the French Revolution.

“People who come in out of curiosity sometimes ask whether this is a museum,” says Jammes. “I tell them that the difference is, for a price, you can leave with the exhibits you like.”

To be surrounded by these books, from typography catalogues to a first edition of Madame Bovary, is to be reminded that human progress – even in the age of smartphones and AI – owes a lot to books. That fact permeates France’s bookshop culture and its proud custodians, Jammes included.
librairiejammes.com

Date founded: 1925
Oldest book in the shop: 1485 edition of De Sphaera Mundi by Johannes de Sacro Bosco
Number of employees: 1

In July 2000 journalists across Paris received a bright orange, Artazart-branded hard hat. Balled up inside was an invitation to attend the construction- site-themed opening party of a new bookshop and cultural space on the Canal Saint Martin: “Artazart, the bookstore of creation.” Next year,the shop will celebrate 25 years of housing graphic design publications and events.

“When we started, we would host up to two events a week,” says Jérôme Fournel, co-founder of Artazart. Sitting beside fellow founder Carl Huguenin, he recalls a time when running Artazart involved a lot of white paint and elbow grease to allow one graffiti artist after another to use the bookshop walls as a celebration of creativity. “We were never strictly a bookshop,” says Huguenin. “There isn’t really another structure like ours that intrinsically mixes illustration and books.”

Artazart’s offering, which ranges from magazines to limited-run artist books, is selected by Laetitia de la Laurencie, Artazart’s book curator. Her meticulous attention to paper quality, layouts and typographic choices when picking books earned her a place running Artazart alongside Huguenin and Fournel. “People come from around the world,” she says. “They are delighted to discover in France places with this kind of richness.”
artazart.com

Date founded: 2000
Recommended books: Homeland by Harry Gruyaert (Carl); Viaggi by Luigi Ghirri (Laetitia); Ishimoto, Lines and bodies – a monograph of late Japanese photographer Yasuhiro Ishimoto (Jérôme)
Number of staff: 9

Alongside its dynamic contemporary art space – complete with a nightclub and gourmet café – Palais de Tokyo also boasts one of the coolest bookshops in Paris. Created in partnership with German art-books publisher Walther König and French literary magazine Cahiers d’Art, the store blends König’s expert eye and the magazine’s 1920s style to create a unique space that carries the biggest selection of art books in Paris.

“We have a big and luminous space where the public is not only attracted to the books on the tables and yellow shelves but also our colourful design objects and our magazines section,” says bookshop manager Arnaud Fremaux. Among the trinkets that visitors can purchase, along with their favourite artists’ catalogues or the latest issue of Les Inrockuptibles magazine, are solar-powered lamps by Olafur Eliasson and tongue-in-cheek pills, by artist Dana Wyse, that promise profound improvements to your life or personality upon swallowing.

Beyond the curated selection and prime location in the heart of the Trocadéro, Fremaux considers the museum’s clientele the key ingredient that makes the bookshop such a vibrant space. “The Palais de Tokyo’s programme always attracts an interesting crowd, and the store is the place to spend a moment of relaxation after seeing an exhibition,” he says.
palaisdetokyo.com

Number of titles: 1,500
Recommended book: Donald Judd Furniture by the Judd Foundation and Mackbooks
Number of staff: 6

Whether or not you live up to your family’s legacy is a classic French plot found in stories by writers from Roger Martin du Gard to Balzac. Perhaps that is why Ève Lambert, daughter of legendary Parisian gallerist Yvon Lambert, felt compelled to create a different legacy all together.

The sleek and cosy result is the Librairie Yvon Lambert, which offers publications on fine arts and photography, a well-stocked magazine wall and an art gallery. “We wanted to continue having a space to organise exhibitions, both with new artists and artists that Yvon has a history with,” Ève tells monocle.

Ève continues to manage the space alongside her father. The pair also run the Yvon Lambert publishing house, which releases limited edition books featuring original works by artists who the Lamberts are close to. “Matisse and Picasso made such books, where there was a relationship between the artist and the author,” says Yvon. “That is the tradition I am carrying on.”

This combination of activities has been a hit with serious art aficionados as well as digital natives. “We have a very young audience that has always known smartphones – and they buy books,” says Ève. “It shows that there is continued affection for the book as an object.”
yvon-lambert.com

Date founded: 2017
Recommended book: Motel 42 by Éloïse Labarbe-Lafon
Recent exhibition: Allegoria Con Ortaggi, Pollame, Cesti E Vasellame, a sculpture exhibition by Luca Resta

Italian publisher Giovanni Antonio Galignani of Lombardy established the Librairie Française et Étrangère bookshop in Paris in 1801. Today a stone plaque outside the door reads: “The first English bookshop established on the continent.” An astute businessman, Galignani also started an English newspaper widely read by the anglophone movers and shakers of the time, including Lord Byron and the Marquis de Lafayette. More than 200 years since its founding, the bookshop – now known simply as Galignani – is back in the hands of its founder’s descendants, with Anne Jeancourt-Galignani at the helm. “Our family had moved away from the profession of bookselling for a few generations,” says Jeancourt-Galignani. “I took over the leadership of the bookshop a few months ago, which has allowed me to reconnect with this family tradition.”

Inside the bookshop’s main room, browsing can require some athleticism. Accessing the titles on the upper shelves involves climbing tall ladders, while nearby stands are stacked with heavy volumes on art and photography. The selection is a testament to the bookshop’s history of adaptation: during the German occupation of Paris, a Nazi command post set up shop next door. With English books banned and unyielding enforcers close by, the shop pivoted to fine-arts books to survive.
galignani.fr

Date founded: 1801
Recommended book: Houris by Kamel Daoud. “A violent but necessary book.”
Annual turnover: €3.8m

The most visited section of Le Bon Marché in the 7th arrondissement features neither handbags nor night creams. The historic department store’s foot-traffic crown instead goes to its vast bookshop, on the top floor, under the original glass roof designed by architects Louis-Charles Boileau and Gustave Eiffel. “Even more than the rest of the store, we have a clientèle that comes very often,” head buyer Noëlle Chini tells monocle. “We have also had a more international clientele drawn by our books on art, decoration, architecture and fashion.”

The selection of literature, cookbooks and bandes dessinées covers all bases but under Chini, who got her start at Le Bon Marché selling postcards nearly 30 years ago, the bookshop has emphasised what she calls “beautiful books”. “Fashion and culture have always carried the store, so we wanted to translate that to the bookshop,” she says.

As well as a well-chosen selection of reading materials, you’ll also find a luxury stationery shop, where patrons can customise notebooks and pens from brands such as Caran d’Ache and Leuchtturm1917. “This is a neighbourhood of publishers,” says Chini. “For us, it makes sense to talk about both reading and writing at the same time.”
lebonmarche.com

Date founded: 2010 in its current form, but Christmas-time book sales date back to the 1880s
Recommended book: Cabane by Abel Quentin
Number of book events per year: About 30

Comic books are too often considered the province of children or anoraks. In France and Belgium, however, bande dessinée (BD) is rightly recognised as a bone fide art form, on the same level as music, architecture or poetry. It’s also a thriving business: in 2023, 75 million BDs were sold in France, the third-best year ever for the industry. “France has a very unique BD culture,” Charlotte Foucault, one of the three partners of Librairie Vignettes, tells monocle. “We are open to all bande dessinées genres, which isn’t the case for Americans or the Japanese.”

Foucault, Ariane Roland and Roxane Pingal had been booksellers together at a larger BD specialist when they decided to strike out on their own in 2020 and open Librairie Vignettes. They offer edgier, more on-the-pulse works and less merchandise now that they are in charge. “Back then, we used to sell a lot of action figures,” says Foucault. “Our idea of bande dessinée is to showcase every genre, including stuff that we don’t like.”

At Vignettes, classics featuring characters such as Tintin and Asterix have their place beside thornier contemporary explorations of topics including feminism or the Israel-Gaza war. This selection reflects the medium’s place in France – as cultural canon with an appeal that continues to bridge the generations.
canalbd.net/vignettes

Date founded: 2020
Recommended book: Madeleine, Résistante, a BD series about historic Résistance figure Madeleine Riffaud
Recent author event: Brothers Ulysse & Gaspard Vry for the release of Un Monde en Pièces

Great readers are not born but places like Chantelivre help to make them. “The original idea was to create a space where you would learn reading through fun, discovery and emotions, and where everyone felt welcome, no matter their previous approach to books,” Alexandra Flacsu, co-director of Chantelivre, tells monocle. Founded in 1974 as the first specialised children’s bookshop in France, Chantelivre revolutionised the literary landscape with its playful approach to reading. “There were comfortable spaces with pillows for children to read in and things were built to fit their height, something that hadn’t really been done before,” says Flacsu.

The 6th arrondissement store was renovated in 2023, and now boasts a complete reading lounge for kids and “la maison des histoires” (the stories house), a dedicated place where children can play and reading sessions with authors and actors are held. Through these activities, books are used not only as mediums for learning but for discovery and moments of sharing. “It’s our way to make reading come alive,” says Flacsu. Today a quarter of Chantelivre’s books are for adults, a choice that she considers to be more inclusive. “We wanted to create a family bookshop. People can come with their toddlers or teens and enjoy a moment together.”
chantelivre-paris.com

Number of titles: 30,000
Recommended books: Lettres d’amour de 0 à 10 by Susie Morgenstern; Graines de Cheffes by Lily LaMotte; Bandes de Boucan by Anais Sautier
Number of employees: 19