Paris Olympics 2024 | Why our cities need pavement booksellers

Pavement booksellers or bouquinistes by the river Seine in Paris. (Photo by Alexey Komarov via Wikimedia Commons 4.0)

The Seine has been called the only river in the world that runs between two bookshelves. This stretch of more than 3 km in Paris is occupied by the bouquinistes, pavement booksellers whose distinctive green boxes contain thousands of second-hand and rare volumes. It’s a practice that started centuries ago, when itinerant merchants purveyed reading material in the vicinity of the city’s bridges.

These Paris booksellers survived Haussmann’s urban makeover but they’re a worried lot nowadays, as the local police have ordered the removal of their bookstalls before the open-air Olympics opening ceremony in 2024. The authorities assert that this is a temporary measure, offering to replace the boxes after the ceremony, but the booksellers’ association is resisting the move. “Yes, we can have a conversation,” said one, “but it’s out of the question to touch our boxes”. For another, “it would be like dismantling the Eiffel Tower”.

Paris isn’t the only city where pavement booksellers face uncertain times. Many still ply their trade along Yangon’s Pansodan Road, but many others have been relocated. The booksellers along Baghdad’s Al-Mutanabbi Street have weathered invasion and occupation, and now put up with urban renovation and increased rentals. Elsewhere in the world, it’s the same story.

Booksellers along Baghdad’s Al-Mutanabbi Street. (Photo via Wikimedia Commons 3.0)

In India, many readers have fond memories of finding just what they were looking for on the streets, along with expert recommendations from vendors. Gita Mehta writes that learning to read meant hearing its pleasures shouted at you by pavement booksellers: “Anna Karenina, sahib. Madame Bovary. Hot books, sahib, only this minute arrived. Believe it or not, tomorrow no copies remaining.” She became an addict, Mehta admits: “Addicted to reading by those pavement magicians shouting at us like circus barkers: those booksellers endlessly rearranging their displays and corrupting us with their seductive litany of titles.”

Growing up in Kolkata, Nilanjana Roy recalls “looking for Trollope or some such novelist” and being asked instead: “Markej podecho? Borjez podecho?” Thus, she embarks on a lifelong affair with Marquez, Borges and company. Bookshops were regulated cathedrals, she says, but pavement bookstalls “were satsangs, full-scale melas where every god you worshipped, from Nabokov all the way down to Danielle Steele, was available—you just had to find the right high priest.”

In an essay on Arun Kolhatkar, A.K. Mehrotra affectionately likens him to a “Bombay loafer,” a homegrown version of Baudelaire’s flaneur, who daily trudged the city’s streets and seldom walked past a pavement bookstall without picking up a treasure. This brings to mind the reading-obsessed Monsieur Mabeuf in Les Miserables, of whom Victor Hugo wrote: “He never went out without a book under his arm, and he often came back with two.”

Pavement booksellers have even made fleeting appearances in fiction. In Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, we’re told that Gogol Ganguli’s father used to devour titles by Graham Greene and Somerset Maugham, “all purchased from his favourite stall on College Street with pujo money”. And Anjali Joseph’s Saraswati Park opens with the protagonist checking out titles on a Mumbai sidewalk, only to feel “dazed and unreal” when he later catches sight of municipal authorities clearing away the bookstalls. One can empathize.

At present, not only have the booksellers near Mumbai’s Flora Fountain been evicted and diminished, but Delhi’s Daryaganj Sunday Book Market has been moved to a new location that isn’t exactly on the streets. Though Kolkata’s College Street soldiers on, the pandemic lockdown and floods caused by Cyclone Amphan in 2020 exacted a stiff price.

Street food vendors seem to have largely escaped a similar fate. Perhaps their deep roots, widespread dispersal and vital service in catering to city dwellers on the move make the authorities suspect that wholesale removals would result in cries of justified outrage.

The state of pavement booksellers is part of a broader urban planning debate, an issue not directly linked to a decline in reading habits. In our neoliberal times, cities are increasingly seen as sites of regulation and control. Spaces become less inclusive, decisions are investment-oriented, and market logic trumps social logic.

Such an attitude was anathema to Jane Jacobs, the inspiring urbanist and activist who championed an approach to cities as living, changing ecosystems. She envisioned pavements, parks, and neighbourhoods working together harmoniously. Among her proposals were mixed-use neighbourhoods, bottom-up community planning, and local development that supported small-scale urban businesses.

Of course, when it comes to street-side activities, some degree of licencing and oversight is necessary – relating to hygiene, safety, and piracy, for example. But developments such as zoning regulations and prioritizing road expansion over pedestrian-friendly pavements only lead to neighbourhoods becoming less free-flowing and more unequal. Money talks louder than well-being.

As Jerry Pinto has pointed out, pavement booksellers are our public libraries, especially at a time when libraries themselves are thin on the ground and “have hedged themselves around with many requirements when all that should be needed is a desire to read”. To meet that desire and make reading more democratic, we need books in open, accessible spaces, and not only within dedicated walls.