April 19, 2023
Paris is known as the City of Light, but it could just as aptly be nicknamed the City of Lit.
After all, it’s the hometown of writer-stuffed cafés, poet-haunted cobbled lanes, green bookstalls flanking the Seine, Gertrude Stein’s salon, Marcel Proust’s cork-lined bedroom, the hunchback’s Notre-Dame, the phantom’s Opera, and Oscar Wilde’s tomb.
The French capital’s historically outsize role in the life of great authors—as a subject, a safe haven, and a seller of their work—is celebrated in the new book Literary Landscapes Paris (Pavilion Books; $28.99), which takes readers on a “photographic stroll” through the city’s noteworthy bookshops, literary cafés, theaters, and other sites that influenced wordsmiths “from Hugo to Hemingway.”
Alongside archival images as well as scores of lush full-color photos of inviting sidewalk tables and enough book-lined shelves to set any bibliophile aflutter, informative text by Dominic Bliss (with a foreword by Sandrine Voillet) supplies details about the history of all the stops, along with info for finding each location the next time you’re in Paris.
Additionally, several standout authors—both homegrown and expatriate—get individual profiles, should you want to tour Victor Hugo’s home, sit in Simone de Beauvoir’s preferred corner window seat at Les Deux Magots, visit the erstwhile gay cruising spots that inspired James Baldwin to write Giovanni’s Room (1956), or hit up F. Scott Fitzgerald’s favorite watering holes (get ready for a long night).
Scroll on to see some of our favorite images from the book.
Pictured above: Shakespeare and Company bookstore on the Left Bank