The most exquisite bookstore in NYC is the Albertine, “a project of the Cultural Services of the French Embassy.” It’s located on Fifth Avenue in a beautiful building owned by the French government just south of the Metropolitan Museum. They carry books in English and French. The ground floor is lovely, but the real star is upstairs. It’s light and airy and has a gorgeous ceiling mural and a few comfortable leather chairs throughout the space. As Michelin would say, “worth a detour.”
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Will have to check that out!
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Going to put in a plug for Indigo bookstore in NJ. A Canadian chain with a US location in the Short Hill Mall. Very lovely gifts and atmosphere and big. They specialize in “coffee table” books, those large Tashen books.
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Book Passage in Corte Madera (north of SF). https://www.bookpassage.com/ Great indie. Lots of author events, writing classes, great travel section, knowledgeable staff with great recommendations. There is also a satellite branch in the Ferry Building in SF.
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Maybe not so bad
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Visited Hatchard’s today. Picts are on my camera, but it was lovely. Next time, however, I will need to be by myself or with some bibliophiles. It was said that we’d been there for 40 minutes when my party wanted to leave, but I really felt it was more like 20m. Regardless, definitely not enough time there!
Perhaps the challenge of the Pride parade going down the street made the time seem longer for my companions? The parade was literally in front of Hatchard’s and they only let people cross the street about every 10 minutes (which we needed to do).
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Back in the day, Carmel Valley, California had The Thunderbird Bookstore and coffee shop, a rare concept in the early 1970s. The books were fascinating, the ambiance lovely. Another fantastic long gone book store was Canterbury Books in Madison, Wisconsin, which had imaginative areas for kids and well curated selections and readings.
Driving past Iowa City, I adore going into Prairie Lights to peruse the shelves. Always interesting.
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Here are a couple of photos from Hatchard’s, which has been my favorite bookstore of the trip (today we saw Livraria Lello). Although the latter was a beautiful bookstore, it was not a great bookstore in terms of variety and selection and pointing out titles one might not be as familiar with. Hatchard’s, however, gets an A for those points.
Livraria Lello was more of a tourist attraction.
Here was the line from the front of the store to the corner.
Then the line from the corner along the side of the block with the extended lines for the 9:00 and 9:30 entrances.
We had entry vouchers for 9:00 (when it opened) and with an 8:45 arrival were about halfway down the block after the corner, and probably got in around 9:15. The vouchers may each be used toward one book, but if you have multiple vouchers that are combined worth less than a book, it doesn’t matter, only one voucher pet book. Vouchers may not be used toward other merchandise (like bags).
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More on Livraria Lello…
One nice thing about the bookstore is that it has sections of various languages (English, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and German were the main ones I saw). They publish their own line of classic books like Animal Farm, The Time Machine, Romeo & Juliet, etc, available in a variety of languages. They also have a special collaboration with the St. Exupery foundation around The Little Prince with some merchandise I hadn’t previously seen.
And, as indicated on the books it publishes and the bags it sells, it IS one of the most beautiful bookstores in the world.
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We loved visiting Livraria Lello when we were in Porto last October. It was busy, but it didn’t take more than 10 minutes for us to get in after our reserved time.
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It looks gorgeous but there is something odd to me about buying a ticket to get into a store to be able to buy stuff (and it looks like the tickets are not cheap?)
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Yes, summers are definitely a more popular time to travel in Europe. Once the kid is out of school we will not be so restricted by school calendars!
The silver level vouchers were 8 Euros each, but a gold level was available, too. I don’t recall how much those were. Of the 7 people in my group who attended, only 2 purchased anything.
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