Better bike lanes, fewer bookshops — the recent changes at Place Saint-Michel are a mixed bag. The bicycle lanes at Place Saint-Michel are now wider and better protected than I remember them from before the pandemic. This is typical of the improvements that have been made to the bicycle infrastructure Read More …
As I was walking from the Bois-Colombes railway station towards Villa Osouf, I came across this bookshop, Nouvelle & Cie at 69 rue Bourguignons. Because of the Covid-19 pandemic, I hadn’t been in a French bookshop for nearly two years, so I went in — and discovered from a display Read More …
The Faubourg Saint-Antoine is a Paris neighborhood that begins at Place de la Bastille (first photo) and stretches about 2 km eastward to Place de la Nation. The word Faubourg means “outside the walls”, now usually translated as “suburb”. In the Middle Ages this neighborhood was in fact outside the Read More …
The name “Sorbonne” originally referred to a college created in 1253 by Robert de Sorbon, the chaplain and confessor of King Louis IX of France — the king who is now better known as Saint Louis because he killed so many infidels in the Crusades. Later the word “Sorbonne” came Read More …
In the spring of 2019 I was invited to a book-signing in a Paris bookshop, because I had once ordered a book online from the publishing house Editions Alexandrines, so I was on their mailing list. The book in question was Le Paris de Mitterrand by Michèle Cotta, the 30th Read More …
At 3 rue du Taur, just off of Place du Capitole, there is a Gibert Joseph bookshop. This is one of a chain of bookshops that can be found in various French cities, especially near the universities. I have always liked Gibert Joseph because I used to buy my books Read More …
You’d think the people of Düsseldorf would always have been proud that their city was the birthplace of a major nineteenth century author, Heinrich Heine (1797-1856). But no, until quite recently a lot of people in Düsseldorf wished he had gone off and been born somewhere else. Why? Generations of Read More …
The Anger is one of Erfurt’s main squares. All the streetcar lines cross here, so you can change here to get to anywhere from anywhere else in Erfurt. The name Anger has nothing to do with the English word anger. (It’s even pronounced differently.) In German it is a regional Read More …
I was never actually stationed in Saigon (as it used to be called), but I have been there fifteen times so far: four times in 1964, eight times in 1965 and three times in 1995. In a letter dated July 17, 1964, I wrote: I am now ca. 31,000 ft. Read More …
This English-language bookshop on Rue de la Carreterie in Avignon was founded in 1994 (or 1992, depending on which website you believe) by Wolfgang Zuckermann. He called it “Shakespeare” in the tradition of the bookshop “Shakespeare & Co.” that was started in Paris by Sylvia Beach in 1919. Wolfgang Zuckermann Read More …