French bookshops ask to be treated as essential services during new lockdown

“Leave our bookstores open so that social confinement does not also become cultural isolation,” they write. “Our readers, who love independent bookstores, would not understand it and would experience it as an injustice … books satisfy our need for understanding, reflection, escape, distraction, but also sharing and communication.”

“Lire, c’est vivre,” they say: reading is living.