Books, books, and a few more books

Editions du SeuilOne of my favorite places this summer was actually my office. If your familiar with Paris geography at all, it’s in the 6th arondissement between Odéon and St. Michel, and if your not, it is near the Seine right by Notre Dame. It’s an excellent location, surrounded by restaurants and cheap take-away places selling crepes, Palestinian sandwiches, pizza, and “asiatique” food, which is the French version of take-away Chinese, a long bar of random Asian-like foods that will be microwaved and handed to you in plastic-sealed containers. As I working in foreign rights for a publishing house, it’s located in the heart of what is essentially the publishing quarter of Paris. Almost every significant French publisher is located with a 7-block radius of each other, and a good bet is that their authors aren’t far away. It is also the head-quarters of Gilbert-Joseph, a French chain of booksellers. They have four large stores in the area, that sell everything from technical academic books, to foreign language fiction, to art books, all at discounted prices because they will resell any undamaged books you sell back to them.
And tucked into a little corner, amongst the tasty cheap food and slightly-used, cheap books (what could be better?) is a little hotel particulier with a big, green, worn door. The only indication that there is a business inside is a small framed poster for “Le Seuil”. A quick ring of the buzzer, and you enter into a small hallway filled with cardboard boxes of freshly delivered books and samples, packages, and store displays to be delivered. Around the corner is the reception, with an awkwardly low couch (I think to discourage lingering visitors) and the coffee machine that spits out plastic cups of coffee, complete with little plastic spoons already inside, for only 25 cents. Up three flights of winding stairs of varying heights, or a slightly longer trip in the tiny elevator, and you arrive in my office. A large room with two big windows and covered on every side by enormous, chaotic bookshelves filled with children’s and arts books in every language imaginable and files and files and some more files over there. In the middle of the room there are three large desks, invariably coated in papers, books, and the weird, colorful French files essentially made of folded paper. The French don’t have the same filing system of manila folders with label tabs stashed in drawers in hanging files, instead they have folded paper of varying degrees of the thickness filled with paper and stashed in boxes, making things much harder to alphabetize or organize in anyway.
This room is where I spent the majority of my semester chilling with my young bosses, translating, and enjoying the fact that I finally felt immersed in France, the only foreigner in a building full of French women with great style, trim figures, and the job I can only dream of.