Last week I wrote about Shakespeare and Company, this week we’ve got the other bookshop I visited on that Paris trip – Eyrolles, which is just around the corner (in Paris terms) and also has a stationery section. My sort of shop. Sadly I forgot to take a photo of the front, so apologies for that.
The first time I went into a French bookshop, I think one of the biggest differences in noticed compared to a British one was the white spines. And then I noticed the size difference. And how many of them were published by Folio. It was only when I got my first French book back to the shelf that I noticed that they write the opposite way on the spine to British books. And it’s been… well a while since that first visit, and French publishing has changed reassuringly little. There are a few differences though
And it’s not just the nonfiction shelves, a lot of fiction is the same. Except for crime fiction. A lot of them get black spines. And I spent a lot of time in French bookshops during the year that I lived there, and I’ve still not really worked out what the rule is for what gets what on that front. And my French translations of Agatha Christie have yellow covers and spines.
The bit where I noticed a change was in the romance and Romantasy where there were they now seem to be using some of the same covers as other countries rather than going for something completely different: I mean look at the cover on the French translation of Casting Off that I bought – I think we’re on the fourth generation of covers for the Cazalet series in the UK and that is nothing like any of them.
I guess it’s too early to tell if this is the BookTok influence – meaning that people all over the world want their covers to match the ones they’ve seen the US book influencers waving, no matter which language it’s in, but considering how different I know the covers used to be (which I don’t with some of the other countries where I’ve seen the same trend) it’s where I’ve wondered about it the most.
But somethings don’t change – here you see that the spines might not be white, but they’re not all the wrap around cover-spine thing that we get so much in the UK. As I said, I bought a copy of Casting Off in French, some very nice stationery (I love Seyes ruled paper, and have produced some of my best handwriting on it over the years) and felt like proper Parisians, then we went off down the road to Shakespeare and Company to be touristy!
Have a great weekend
Verity Reads Books (lots of them) 