One of my favourite places to hang out is the Librairie de Paris in place de Clichy. There's a great café – Au Petit Poucet – right next door, so you can start reading your purchases straight away. Despite the fact that this column is written in English, I can and do read French books.
One thing that has always intrigued me, though, is your strangely indifferent attitude to book cover design. Book covers are advertisements for the story beneath. British publishers like Penguin have a long history of innovative design and I have often bought books based on their covers.
In France, the most prestigious book covers are… blank. Gallimard started it all, I suppose, with their iconic cream and red covers, as if somebody has cut their throat over a glass of sour milk. Others seem to have followed suit. For a book to be taken seriously, it should be a shade of white – perhaps with a loose red band featuring a picture of the author. The blurb on the back should reveal as little as possible about the story. An obscure paragraph from the book or some out-of-context dialogue is ideal. Most other book covers seem to consist of stock photos messed around in Photoshop.
My theory is that your lack of dramatic covers forces your authors to think of better titles. Parle-leur de batailles, de rois et d'éléphants (Mathias Énard, Actes Sud). Now there's a title that sells itself.
