Anglophone expats in Paris have mourned the closure of the beloved Red Wheelbarrow bookshop since 2012, but just a few months ago, Penelope Fletcher returned to the scene with a new address on the Left Bank – and we couldn’t be more thrilled.
Fletcher was born and raised on the west coast of Canada, and after working in bookshops in her native land, she moved to Paris in 1990, opening the original Red Wheelbarrow in 2001 in the Marais.
Fletcher’s new shop has moved south from the original address: it now overlooks the Pantheon, the final resting place of writers like Emile Zola and Victor Hugo, and joins a rich Left Bank literary tradition, as the former home of Camus, Sartre, Hemingway, and more.
The bookshop retains more than its name – which Fletcher drew from a poem by William Carlos Williams. It also retains the sense of community that made the first shop so beloved, one of the key things that Fletcher says makes any bookshop great.
The bookshop will host regular events, from readings to writing groups. Fletcher has even created a de facto stage with a chair perched high above the shop floor, the perfect place from which to declaim one’s most recent prose.
She also notes that any great bookshop has a proprietor who knows what to order.
“Keeping your ear to the ground. Rolling with the haywire,” she says. “I know bookstores that when Internet came out, they didn’t compete. Bookselling is something that changes, and you have to be able to adapt and keep going.”
The proprietor is indeed one of the key elements that gives a bookshop its soul, and it’s perhaps Fletcher herself, more than anything, that Parisians are so happy to see return.
“After I lost the other bookstore and I was back in Canada, I was trying to think, ‘What other career could I do?'” she says. After taking a career test that told her she should be a sociologist, she knew she had picked the right job all along.
“We are kind of like sociologists,” she says of being a bookseller: knowing what people might like, making associations, and bringing people together.
The Red Wheelbarrow Bookshop - 9 Rue de Médicis, 75006