The quays, the bouquinistes and the bookshops of the Latin Quarter

Walks · 17 October 2026

Paris is the only major city in the world whose river is lined with open-air bookshops. They have been there since the sixteenth century; they have been banned, tolerated and regulated, and they are still there. Here is how to enjoy them, and where to go once you climb back up from the quays.

The green boxes

There are around two hundred and thirty bouquinistes and close to nine hundred boxes, spread over three kilometres of parapet on both banks, from the pont Marie to the quai du Louvre on the right bank, and from the quai de la Tournelle to the quai Voltaire on the left.

The boxes are standardised: wagon green, fixed dimensions, four per pitch, and no more than one in four may hold anything other than books. That is what stops the quays turning into a souvenir market, even if the rule gets stretched.

The trade goes back to sixteenth-century pedlars selling books on the Pont-Neuf. Established booksellers had them driven off several times; they always came back. They won a legal status in the nineteenth century, with numbered pitches and a fee. Today the City allocates pitches free of charge, on application, in return for opening a minimum number of days a year.

The banks of the Seine have been a UNESCO World Heritage site since 1991, and the bouquinistes count as part of that landscape.

How to browse without wasting time

• Go in the afternoon. Many open only from eleven or midday, and some only in fine weather: the boxes are not watertight.
• Left bank, between pont Saint-Michel and pont de la Tournelle, for books. Right bank, more posters, prints and old postcards.
• Ask. Many bouquinistes specialise, and what is in the box is only part of the stock. Anyone after crime fiction, aviation or local history will find their dealer in two questions.
• Bargain on a lot, not on a single item. The custom does not lend itself to haggling over one book.
• Framed prints at five euros are almost always plates cut from nineteenth-century books. That is not a forgery, but it is not an original etching either.

Shakespeare and Company

At 37 rue de la Bûcherie, facing Notre-Dame: a yellow and green front, books to the ceiling, a piano upstairs and beds between the shelves.

Beware a confusion that is actively maintained. The first Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach's, was at 12 rue de l'Odéon from 1919 to 1941. It published Joyce's Ulysses in 1922 when nobody else would, and served as a salon for the Americans in Paris, Hemingway included. It closed under the Occupation and never reopened.

The present shop was founded in 1951 by George Whitman as Le Mistral. He renamed it in 1964, on Sylvia Beach's death and with her blessing, in tribute. From the start it has given free beds to passing writers, the Tumbleweeds, in exchange for a few hours' work a day, a page of autobiography and a book read a day. Tens of thousands of people have slept there.

There is almost always a queue outside. Go in anyway: the line moves, and the upper floor, with its reading library and piano, is not a room you forget.

The bookshops of the quarter

Despite the rents, the Latin Quarter remains the densest bookshop district in Paris.

• Boulevard Saint-Michel, the large second-hand and textbook houses, where students have bought and sold their course books for generations.
• Rue Saint-Jacques and rue Soufflot, academic booksellers organised by discipline.
• Rue de l'Odéon, on the edge of the 6th, antiquarian dealers and first editions.
• Around place de la Sorbonne, philosophy and the human sciences.

And to extend the evening, the quarter has kept more art-house cinemas than anywhere else in the city, concentrated on rue des Écoles and rue Champollion: three screens in a single street, programming retrospectives in the original language all year. It is one of the things that still clearly sets this quarter apart.

The walk, end to end

An hour and a half, taking it slowly.

1. Start at the pont de la Tournelle, where a statue of Sainte Geneviève looks upstream.
2. Walk the quai de Montebello along the boxes, Notre-Dame opposite.
3. Detour through square René-Viviani for its false acacia, planted in 1601, the oldest tree in Paris, propped on a stone crutch.
4. Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre, just behind, one of the oldest churches in the city.
5. Shakespeare and Company, twenty metres on.
6. Continue along the quai Saint-Michel and the quai des Grands-Augustins to the pont des Arts.

On the way back, climb rue de l'Odéon to the Luxembourg.

All articlesThe Latin QuarterExplore Paris