We like books and love to discover interesting bookstore on our trips. In this two-part series, we visit two very different bookstores—contrasting in location, longevity, and content—but both sit squarely in the flow of tourist traffic. In our previous post, we focus on Skaguay News Depot & Books, an independent shop in Skagway, a cruise ship port of call in Alaska. This post will take you to the sunny south of France, where a global luxury brand has set up a seasonal pop-up store.
Le Buste et l’oreille is a wine bar located in Arles, in the Provence region of France. It regularly uses its space to host various events. This summer the wine bar has partnered with Louis Vuitton to launch an ephemeral, pop-up bookstore (librarire éphemère).
Arles is a Provençal city that was once an important Roman colony, and its amphitheater, baths and necropolis are grouped together and recognized by UNESCO as Romanesque monuments. It is also famous as Van Gogh lived here briefly and created many works based on its landscape.
Enjoy some music while browsing.
Every summer since 1970, Arles transforms into an open-air gallery for Rencontres d’Arles, one of the world’s foremost photography festivals. The festival occupies the city’s historic spaces—from chapels and crypts to supermarkets and factories—with many exhibitions that challenge what photography can reveal and how it can move us.
Taking part in the festival and in association with Louis Vuitton, the wine bar has become a temporary bookstore that showcases exclusively publications by Éditions Louis Vuitton.
For the fifth year, Louis Vuitton presents an updated edition of its City Guide dedicated to Arles.
Every month in this summer, the bookstore is hosting – “One City Guide, One photographer, One tasting”, a wine-tasting, book-signing event which invites a photographer that contributed to the publications.
The bookstore occupies an airy, highly visible spot in the wine bar adjacent to the area that serves drinks and snacks.
Only three series of publications are sold at this bookstore.
The Fashion Eye collection explores creations by an individual photographer while celebrating the art of travel in a city, a region or a country. Each title in the collection brings together a varied mix of perspectives—shifting between destinations, urban panoramas and natural landscapes, moments of daily life and more contemplative scenes, captured in both color and black-and-white.
While we are not surprised by Saint-Tropez as a destination in this series, the title “Kilamba” by Laura Bonnefous (with an orange cover) is a mystery as the city is initially unknown to us. Located in Angola and built by China (started in 2007), this African city was conceived with modernist planning and the ambition to house up to half a million residents. Once labeled a “ghost city” for its low occupancy, Kilamba has, since 2016, gradually filled with life—becoming a vivid case study in the interplay of 21st-century urban design, socioeconomic forces, and transformation.
The other rainbow-colored series is Louis Vuitton’s “City Guides”, launched in 1998 and now containing more than 30 cities in both print and digital formats. Over the years, the collection has positioned itself as an essential companion for certain discerning travelers.
This year, Louis Vuitton has updated ten editions of its City Guides: Paris, London, New-York, Beijing, Lisbon, Moscow, San Francisco, Seoul, Singapore, and Tokyo.
The third series of books on sale are “Travel Book (Carnet de Voyage)” which according to Louis Vuitton is “… an invitation to real and virtual voyages. In its pages, the illustrations of renowned artists and promising young talents tell the stories of the cities and countries they have visited. The creative worlds on show are highly diverse: during their travels, these artists from various corners of the world were free to choose their mode of expression, from painting and illustration to collage and manga.”
No photographs, only illustrations and paintings.
Top rows (L to R): Brussels by Ever Meulen; Indonesia by Atak; Barcelona by Marc Desgrandchamps
Bottom row: Rome by Miles Hyman; Mars by François Schuiten; Tokyo by Eboy
The wine bar, of course, sells bottles of wine and being in Provence, a good selection of rosé wine.
Aside from selling books and wine, they also sell used vinyl records, all in pretty good conditions. There are French as well as American music.
As we noted at the outset, this two-part series highlights two very different bookstores. The Alaskan shop stays open year-round, even through the quiet winter months, and publishes its own titles while selling alongside a wide range of works—fiction and non-fiction—focused on the region.
By contrast, the French bookstore appears only during the summer photography festival, sells exclusively one publisher’s books on various cities and regions, and, for the rest of the year, operates as a wine bar.
If you missed Part 1, click here.