The same day as we visited The Village Voice, we also visited Abbey Bookshop – one of those secondhand bookshops where the books have taken over every available shelf or table long, long ago and now are everywhere, stacked on the floor and on the tables so you hardly dare breathe in there… Some of the shelves were already broken and more will most definitely break soon! The homepage describes it very well: “Looking at the groaning, jam-packed shelves and shaky stacks of books in the narrow store and crowded bookcases in the medieval basement, the new visitor could well wonder if there is any method to the inviting madness.” Yes, the new visitor definitely did that – and the new visitor never discovered a basement … Probably because the stairs were concealed by stacks and stacks of books … The owner is very helpful and friendly and my boyfriend did pick up an interesting non-fiction about the knights templar as well as another book. I, on the other hand, was so overwhelmed that I couldn’t even find one book to buy …
The second bookstore we made it to this, our second day in Paris, was Tea and Tattered Pages. Again, this is a secondhand bookshop and it seemed to have a lot of well-used and/or well-loved novels – especially romance fiction, it seemed to me. The owner was a kind, elderly lady with a gorgeous orange cat. There is really a lot of books in this store and contrary to Abbey Bookshop, these books are actually sorted in categories so it’s easier to browse. Neither of us bought anything though – but we both like our books to be worn out by ourselves … If you don’t mind that, this is a really great store!
The Literary Bunny 