They could just as easily have called it Time Travel Paris. This beautiful book is a portal to the past, via 18 shops and museums whose stock and décor are old-fashioned and proud of it. The line-up is the stuff of nursery rhymes: the bookshop, the braid maker, antiques dealer, haberdasher – all in premises that reek of wood polish and generations-old expertise, even on the page. Author-illustrator Montagut includes his own homeware shop on the Left Bank (fair enough), and his and the other 17 premises are lavishly photographed in overview and close-up. Enchanting.
Timeless Paris (Marin Montagut, Flammarion, 2021, ISBN 9782080206985, 240pp, £30)
NOTES
This book review was published in the February 2022 issue of France magazine.
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