a blind flaneur

The BBC Radio 4 program about les bouquinistes aired this morning, and I am thrilled to be part of it! Many thanks to producer Geoff Bird for bringing me into the process, and for Phil who alerted me to the broadcast. Listen now. Or launch the audio player from the BBC Radio 4 web page.

Thomas Jefferson once said, “Every man has two countries, his own and France.” By France he surely meant Paris. I know the sentiment. Pursuing this dual citizenship of the heart is one of my life’s great passions , and it’s a leitmotif of this blog.

John Trumbull’s Declaration of Independence is a 12-by-18-foot oil-on-canvas painting in the United States Capitol Rotunda that depicts the presentation of the draft of the Declaration of Independence to Congress. It was based on a much smaller version of the same scene, presently held by the Yale University Art Gallery.[1] Trumbull painted many of the figures in the picture from life and visited Independence Hall as well to depict the chamber where the Second Continental Congress met. The oil-on-canvas work was commissioned in 1817, purchased in 1819, and placed in the rotunda in 1826.

One of the first books I ever touched – long before I knew how to read – came from Paris. My father sent it to my sister for Christmas in 1945. It is inscribed, “To Diana Lee – Love, Daddy” which makes it priceless in my esteem.

In my chat with the BBC producer, I suggested that he talk with Robert Darnton, the eminent historian of the history of books and publishing in 18th-century France. Darnton wrote a trilogy of books about the literary underworld thriving on the banks of the Seine, and many other places. The books are: The Business of Enlightenment (1979), The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982), and The Forbidden Bestsellers Of Pre-Revolutionary France (1995). Darnton’s project was writing a social history of the ideas of the Enlightenment.

I talked with a BBC producer who is putting together a half-hour radio show about les bouquinistes in Paris. He found me via this story, one of the earliest posts on a blind flaneur. I was sad the day it dropped off the bottom of the home page. I thought, maybe no one would ever find or read it again. Not so! Talking about the bouquinistes transported me back to idyllic afternoons strolling on the banks of the Seine.

All the talk about slow food and  slow blogging reminds me of this story from the Left Bank. I published it first in September 2007, near the beginning of this blog. It remains one of the most satisfying pieces of new writing that I’ve done here. I was sad the day it dropped off the [...]

[Photos by lodrorigdzin; all rights reserved]
Alex was in Paris last week, and he kindly asked if he could photograph anything in particular for me. He knew I’d love these images of the book stalls on the Seine. The offer was enough to set me loose in the time-space continuum. Perched on a ladder half a [...]

[Source: NYT, Jolly nad Green, With an Agenda]
Dear Santa,
I’d love to stroll along the Seine and browse the bookstalls on Dec. 25. Will any be open for business? There is no better gift for a bouquiniste and blind flaneur than a musty old book. Any French book printed before 1900 would thrill me. AbeBooks.com [...]

For many years I carried in my head an unfinished project that I called Gutenberg’s Exile. That phrase was shorthand for the complex relationship I have with books and reading. I was cut off from the printed word, expelled from the Gutenberg Revolution. A little twist of fate in my own DNA [...]