Jessica Svendsen

I have also missed this place, a lot. Though I was a resident there in 2007—with a mattress between the shelves and all—I visited there often last summer when I was in Paris. It was pleasant to experience the shop as a patron, instead of a dirty, sleep-deprived, but happy tumbleweed.

I mostly wish to return because while I was a tumbleweed, I read copiously and I read things I had never heard of before. Camille Paglia. Françoise Sagan. Simone de Beauvoir. Though I stayed there to read James Joyce’s Ulysses at the bookshop that published it, I also read so much else. What I read shaped my thinking during my last two years at Yale. I miss having unsatisfied curiosity, and I miss having the time to satiate it.

For a quick tutorial on what it is like to live in this shop, watch this documentary on George Whitman, A Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man:

This summer, I have really missed Paris. I spent my last two summers there, and I am feeling its absence acutely. Though I can bake the tastiest baguette on this side of the Atlantic, I miss the 1 Euro baguette from inside Boulangerie Secco’s pink and blue facade, or crispy baguette from Boulanger de Monge. I miss buying produce at the Marché Biologique Raspail, riding the escalators to the top of Le Centre Pompidou for the best rooftop view of the city, walking through Père Lachaise or the jardins of the Musée Rodin, reading alongside the Canal St. Martins, shopping at Comptoir des Cotonniers, the accordion players in the metro, seeing classic films or retrospectives every night at cinema, and of course, the architecture. The glum and slum of New Haven seems so far away from the cobble-stone backstreets of Paris.

I need to move there, and soon. It is the only place where I feel happy and at home.

My nostalgia has resulted in a re-screening of every film I own about Paris, reading books set in Paris, and even pathetically looking through my hundreds of photographs that I took there.