Joe Ray

May 25, 2006 - The Star-Ledger

PARIS—Cue the accordion music, the Notre Dame church bells and the beautiful woman walking home with a baguette under her arm.

This is the backdrop to riverside bookseller Alain Frolich’s business, a living landscape he has been an integral part of for 30 years.
Until now.

Even here on the banks of the Seine River, a part of Paris wonderfully frozen in time, Internet commerce is casting its shadow.

“Everything I learned in 30 years, you can just tap into Google,” says Frolich, his fingers typing in the air, “and you’ll find what you’re looking for.”

Frolich is what as known as a bouquiniste—one of what he estimates to be about 200 used booksellers who hawk their wares from rows of giant, dark-green storage boxes affixed along the top of the river’s quays. At the end of June, however, Frolich is calling it quits.
Though he is leaving on his own terms before being squeezed out of the market, you get the feeling that he soon would be unless the bouquinistes change their game.

Bouquinistes have sold old books along the river since the 1600s, standing next to their books, drumming up business and creating clients one passerby at a time.

“There aren’t many of us who still specialize in old books,” he says. “This is a trade in the process of disappearing.” He drifts off as if to make sure what he’s saying is really true, then says, “Yes, I think so.”

Though bouquinistes are required by the city to have old books make up a certain amount of their stock, more and more of them are relying on other, more tourist-friendly products such as posters, miniature Eiffel Towers and old pin-ups to make their living.

For Frolich, however, being a bouquiniste is an expression of his curiosity about the world, books and the people he meets every day. Though he has some items that are certainly more mass market, including a heart-meltingly cute illustrated book called “On s’aimera tout la vie” (“We’ll Love Each Other All Our Lives”), which is held together by a rubber band, selling trinkets to tourists doesn’t inspire him.

He is more interested in old, leather-bound copies of Emile Zola or Victor Hugo, or trying to figure out if a drawing he found in one of his books is an original Delacroix. Thanks to these specialties, he has a string of regular clients who come by at such a rate that having an extended conversation with him while he’s at work is nearly impossible.

A copy of On S’Aimera Tout La Vie (We’ll Love Each Other All Our Lives), held together by a rubber band. Photo by Joe Ray.

“They’re all crazy about books,” he says. “That’s why we’re friends.”

Frolich always seems to have something special tucked away in a corner of one of his boxes, ready for when specific customers come to call.

“They aren’t obliged to buy them, but I’m always bringing something in for someone.”

When it comes to nuts and bolts, he’s ready to haggle to get a good price for his books, but he’ll occasionally give in with a smile, saying, “Ahh, it’ll give me more room.”

At one point, a prominent museum director stops in to pick up a special order and tries to whittle away at the asking price, but this time Frolich doesn’t back down much. Frolich mentions he once acquired a book for French President Jacques Chirac, who was the city’s mayor at the time, but “he never came to pick it up.”

For an interview with a reporter, he suggests meeting at Le Metro, a nondescript café near his stand, where he likes to hold court with clients and friends Sunday evenings. For every question he is asked, he has one in reply. He’s brought along a copy of a book called “Indians Abroad,” by Carolyn Thomas Forman, which was given to him by a former U.S. Marine.

Inside the front cover, he has found the inscription, “To Bob—from Gloria, Christmas 1944,” and inside the back cover, “Lt. Robert Douglass, Chief Robert White Eagle, Rec’d in Holland.”

Frolich thinks the book might have come to France with an American soldier, or been sent to him as a gift during World War II. Born in 1941, with liberation parades among his first memories, Frolich has it in his head to return the book to the owner or his descendants.

It seems like the perfect thing to look up on the Internet, but that’s not his style.

Though he harbors no ill will about how the Web is helping turn people like him into a rare breed, it probably won’t be until he retires that he starts looking up stuff like “Lt. Douglass” online.

For bouquinistes and other independent booksellers, it is becoming increasingly difficult to conduct business off line.

“Part of me senses that this is a change in how people are living,” says Sylvia Whitman, who runs the famous English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Company, just down the quay from Frolich’s stall. “Less people are taking time to stroll the banks of the Seine and look for old books. Some customers just want to get their book and buy it fast.

“That’s not what we’re about.”

Asked about the impact of the Internet on his job, Frolich has a quick response. “I lose clients.

“I had a friend who was looking for a book. I sought it out for him and one day he shows up on the quay, and he had found it on the Internet at another bouquiniste.”

But the biggest loss for Frolich will be his contact with the customers who have become his friends.

“If I’m on the Web,” he says, “I don’t get to meet you.”

Joe Ray is a freelance writer based in Paris. He can be reached via his Web site, www.joe-ray.com.