Nanjing: A Passionate Journey Admist the Ocean of Books

2023-08-04 16:01:00

Nanjing is a city with passion for culture, history, and ideals, and the bookstore is one of the important carriers of the citys' soul. At the first stop of this City Walk, we are coming to Librairie Avant-Garde, which was selected as one of the Top 10 Bookstores in the world by National Geographic.

Librairie Avant-Garde is built in a bomb shelter. Looking at the bookstore from the other side of the road, we found the door is covered in leaves, quiet and humble, with no fancy design on the facade, only the white "Librairie Avant-Garde" on the gray background. It has quite a "hermit in the city" style. There is a shed in front of the door for passers-by and readers to shelter and rest.

Walking down into the bookstore, we find a space full of wonders. Wandering along the long shelf corridor, our sight was filled with books. Under the soft light, this scene made us feel holy, solemn, artistic and comfortable. The slogan "the stranger on the earth" could be seen almost everywhere. To some extent, we are all strangers on the earth, and we all come to this world as visitors in a tour to search for the home for our souls. This bookstore serves as such a unique spiritual home, attracting visitors to create their own precious memories with the book, the bookstore, and Nanjing.

Here, we also saw a lot of postcards from all over the world. Via them, we listened to the stories of many people and greeted warmly with strangers. Readers leave their stories on the cards because the bookstore has a large number of books, has been carefully creating a great reading environment, and the founder of the bookstore adheres to the "readers first" concept. As a result, everything here has a power to purify the soul.

On the way from Librairie Avant-Garde to Scholar Bookstore in Taoguxincun, we passed by "Three Coffee" café on Shanghai Road. Entering here is like boarding a time machine. The old furniture and things seem to take us back to Nanjing in the 1970s and 1980s. Quaint dining tables, nostalgic cameras and radios, walls of Chinese and foreign movie posters, old literary theories, art criticism books, poems and novels all made us feel captivated.

After a short break, we came to the Scholar Bookstore. Walking into the bookstore is more like walking into a small vintage nostalgia museum, which not only contains all kinds of old books, but also many old newspapers, calligraphy, paintings and coins from all over the world in the 1950s and 1960s. The second floor of the bookstore is the owner's private museum and old movie posters and embroideries are hung on the brick-red walls of the staircase. From the coffee bean grinder, purple clay pot, Nanjing map, street card, to the record player, dresser, piano in different ages... The traces left by each old object is telling the past of Nanjing. There may be plenty of old bookstores, but Nanjing Scholar Bookstore has a mellow sense of history coming from the collection of old items worldwide. When nostalgic people set foot on Nanjing, they can recall these distant memories.

These bookstores have stood firm for decades, recording the changes and innovations of Nanjing City, reflecting the love of Nanjing people for culture, and also the epitome of Nanjing's humanistic feelings.

If you have time, you may wish to take a walk in these places, and you will definitely have a different and profound feeling of Nanjing.