France Buissonnière: a vagabond bookseller

At the weekly market of Saint-Paterne-Racan (Indre-et-Loire, 1,600 inhabitants), an unusual ambulant trade appeared in early February. The onlookers will find no apples, nor rillons, or goat cheeses, local productions. But books. No used or destocked books, sold on the SKIT. Real new books, like those we sell in bookstore. It is indeed indeed a bookstore that offers them, in the midst of vegetable and cold cutters. Housed inside a wooden trailer of 9 square meters, the head in the clouds – such is his name – began three months ago a tour of France rural markets. His goal: to bring the book where it is not always easy to get it. If you do not come to Lagardère, Lagardère will go to you …

Ex-employee of a Metz bookstore and the city’s media library, Laurie Fardoit started drawing the outlines of his project a decade ago, “convinced,” she said, that kind of life where we change location regularly, to meet different people, was made for [her]. It finally decides to borrow money to acquire a trailer and a commercial vehicle designed to tow it on departmental roads, rarely national – cruising speed: 75 km / h. A carpenter will develop chests and shelves inside. What storing and exposing 1,200 references – novels, tests, comics and youth albums. Ride youth precisely!

“A lot of good waves”

Began around her, in Lorraine where, for a year, she escaped markets away from urban areas, her “human and professional adventure” set Cape Town to West, in October 2021. gold first. Touraine today, she will leave late February. Will follow the Vendée, the Loire-Atlantique, Brittany, Normandy, New-Aquitaine … The journey must last two years in all, during which laurie Fardit, single without child, will move from home to another – mainly Furnished at low prices and rooms at home. The young woman does not get enough income from her activity to pay a salary: “But that can not be long, she says. My turnover [between 2,000 and 3,000 euros per month] keeps ceases to increase. “

 Laurie Fardoit in front of his trailer-bookstore, to the market of Saint-Paterne-Racan (Indre-et-Loire), February 10, 2022 .

Many benevolence, for the time being, the reward on a daily basis. Does his project do not combine two strong trends revealed by the health crisis: the boom of reading (and bookstore) and the fashion of itinerant shops? “I feel a lot of good waves around me, does it entrust. The trip and the book make people dream.” The Vagabonde Bookseller is not content with Romanesque prescriptions: it also offers readings at the foot of its trailer or Scripture workshops in schools. It even happened to him, in Lorraine, to organize signatures of local authors within the narrow cockpit of his shop on wheels.

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/Media reports.