Secrètes de Paris

If you've ever wandered all the way down to the end of the Galerie Vivienne, one of the beautifully-restored covered passages in the 2nd arrondissement, you would have seen the Librairie Jousseaume. I love this book store. I've never been inside. I don't dare. I might actually have enough cash on me to buy every single thing in the window if I was brave enough to ask the price. Last week when I went by they had a collection of kitsch cookbooks, including a few English ones like "Clémentine in the Kitchen" from 1943, and an original "I Hate to Cook Book" from the 1970s series.



In the other window was a collection of neighborhood guides to Paris, 18 small books "pour connaitre Paris" with titles like "St-Germain-des-Prés et La Coupole", "Le Paris Classique", "Comment Paris s'est Formé", and "Vieux Hotels du Marais" most certainly written before the Marais district was rescued from its slum conditions in the late 1960s! I was recently looking at a Paris guide book written in the 1980s and didn't recognize 75% of the restaurants and hotels listed. Just goes to show that as much as the city seems to stagnate in "museum" mode, it really is constantly changing.