Closure of an iconic Paris bookshop alarms French
bibliophiles
This
article is more than 4 months old
Hit hard by the pandemic, the flagship Gibert Jeune
store is closing its doors – one of many booksellers in the city feeling the
strain of Covid-19
Julia
Webster Ayuso
Tue 19 Jan
2021 10.00 GMT
Paris, a
great literary city, is losing one of its most celebrated bookshops. Gibert
Jeune, a popular chain, has announced it will be closing its flagship shop in
the Latin Quarter in March – the latest in a series of closures and appeals for
help that threaten the future of the city’s booksellers.
Gibert
Jeune once attracted long queues of students in search of cheap secondhand
books before the start of each academic year; most students who have studied in
Paris will have paid a visit to the six-floor shop at some point to find a book
for their course. The family-owned company was founded in 1886 and started out
as a bookstall on the banks of the Seine, quickly expanding into several shops
in the fifth arrondissement, selling a mixture of new and secondhand books. Its
bright yellow awnings along the Boulevard St Michel became a familiar landmark
of the Latin Quarter, historically Paris’s literary and intellectual
neighbourhood, and home to the Sorbonne.
Now, with
sales down 60% due to the pandemic, the chain’s most iconic shop – 5 Place
Saint-Michel – will be closing as part of a restructuring plan, after the owner
of the building decided to sell. It follows the move of Boulinier, another
much-loved bookshop, which was forced to leave its historic location due to rising
rents (it is now in a different shop on the same street). Meanwhile the
centuries-old bouquinistes just across the road on the quays of the Seine are
struggling to survive.
The
pandemic has emptied the area of people for months. “Covid arrived and suddenly
there were no more tourists and no more students,” said Rodolphe Bazin de Caix,
marketing manager of Gibert Jeune. “We’re talking about a bookshop whose DNA is
80% textbooks, many of them secondhand. This shop was impacted much more than
the others.”
When France
was put into a second lockdown in October, there was a huge outcry from
booksellers, who asked to be treated as essential services and remain open.
Shakespeare and Company, one of Paris’s most famous bookshops and a neighbour of
Gibert Jeune, appealed to customers for help as it faced “hard times”:
customers and well-wishers around the world piled in with purchases and
donations to save the shop.
But it is
not just the virus that has weakened Gibert Jeune. Before the pandemic,
disruption caused by the gilet jaunes demonstrations and transport strikes
reduced footfall in the Place Saint-Michel. Gibert Jeune and its sister company
Gibert Joseph have also been slow to react to the threat of Amazon; while the
French secondhand book market is booming (book prices are much higher than in
the UK, making secondhand books 63% cheaper than new ones on average), trade
has mostly been captured by online platforms.
“Gibert
Jeune is not dead,” said De Caix, but it’s having to reinvent itself. The first
Gibert Jeune bookshop, opposite Notre-Dame, is staying put. The company is
currently renovating its shop in the 10th arrondissement, after an independent
bookstore owner’s project to buy it and make it into a “co-operative of ideas”
failed. There are even plans to open at least four smaller Gibert Jeunes,
spread out across the city, by April. In any case, the future lies not in the
tourist centre, but in residential neighbourhoods, De Caix said: “What we
learned from the lockdown is that people aren’t leaving their areas any more.
We realised that the shop, which used to be a destination, no longer serves
that purpose. It’s our turn to move to where the customer is.”
But the
imminent closure of 5 Place Saint-Michel, which opened 50 years ago in 1971,
has led to mourning among book lovers, who find it difficult to imagine what
the square and surrounding neighbourhood will look like after it’s gone. “It’s
a historic place” says Laure Davidian, who works in the area and visits the
shop to buy comic books for her daughter. “It will be much duller without it.”
The Latin
Quarter is known for its independent bookshops and for being the home of
several publishing houses. But in recent years, the area has been slowly
invaded by food retailers and fast fashion brands, which some residents regard
as an erosion of its cultural identity. The fifth and sixth arrondissements
have around a 100 bookshops each, but the French capital has lost 27% of its
bookshops in the past 18 years, according to a study by the Centre for
Observation of Commerce, Industry and Services.
“It is
catastrophic. It’s like the Champs Elysées without the luxury boutiques. They
might as well close the Sorbonne,” said Frédéric, a resident of the
neighbourhood since the 1980s who declined to give his last name. He had
stopped to browse the books in the stall outside Gibert Jeune, which he often
passes on his daily walk. “That used to be a cafe that took up the entire
pavement, where customers would sit,” he said, pointing to the branch of beauty
products chain Sephora across the street. He’s worried the same will happen
with the building in front of him. “Who knows what they will replace it with? I
expect the worst,” he said. “Every place where there is a bookshop is a place
with one less fast food chain, one less Sephora.”
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