“What immediately strikes me is just how tattered the books are. Some of the spines have split. The binding has loosened and the threads stick out. Some of the books are in such bad condition that they seem to be held together only by their place on the shelf. They are neither old nor valuable, but they have had hard lives – emigres, some having arrived with refugees from Russia before the war, only to go back east at a later stage. More than sixty years later they have come home to Paris.”
