Bookseller:
Former San Francisco businessman saw Paris horror close up.
The Paris terror attacks of Nov. 13 hit close to home for bookseller Jim Carroll. Very close to home, in fact. The owner of San Francisco Book Co., an English-language bookstore he co-founded in Paris in 1997, Carroll lives on rue Bichat, on the same block as Le Carillon, one of the sites that was attacked by gunmen. Fifteen people were killed at the bar and at Le Petit Cambodge, a restaurant across the street. The Bataclan concert hall, where 89 people were slain by gunmen, is a kilometer away.
A former San Francisco bookseller whose Left Bank shop is painted in international orange, in honor of the Golden Gate Bridge, Carroll detailed recent events in an e-mail to The Chronicle:
“On Friday night I closed the shop at 9 in the evening and caught the Metro home and got in my door just about 9:15, and almost as soon as I closed the door I heard gunfire. In my youth, I had spent one year in Vietnam, and the sound when I heard it was a very familiar one, even after all these years. It could sound like a whole bunch of firecrackers going off but it also can be automatic rifle fire.
A few minutes later, I went back down to the street and it was already beginning to fill up with neighbors. Just down the street to the left were the two places, Le Carillon and Le Petit Cambodge, about 50 meters from my building entrance, and there were bodies on the ground and people fleeing up the street toward my place. Right at the same time fire trucks and ambulances were beginning to arrive. I didn’t try to get any nearer to the scene.
The following day I decided not to open the shop. I stayed in the area around my apartment. I went down to the corner around noon as cleaning crews were just finishing washing down the street and sidewalks after the police had done all their forensic work. People were beginning to gather and the laying of flowers and candles began. By Sunday my street had become a major pilgrimage destination. All day long throngs coming and going.”
The corner where the restaurants are located happens to be across the street from a large hospital, Hopital SaintLouis, and, Carroll wrote, “There is an entrance on the corner for people to donate blood that’s always been there.” The day after the attacks, the line was, not surprisingly, especially long.
As has been reported, the Right Bank neighborhood that the terrorists struck is popular with young people who crowd the area’s bars, restaurants and nightclubs. A few years ago, Carroll said he watched Woody Allen film a scene at Le Carillon for his 2011 romantic comedy “Midnight in Paris.”
How innocent those days now seem.
“And now what happens?” Carroll wrote. “France is locking itself down. My Muslim friends are worried about how they will be treated. The political right is making lots of noise, of course. The French love to talk, so of course there’s going to be a long ongoing national discussion about all this.
“As to how I, as an American bookshop, will deal with it, I’m not quite sure,” Carroll added. (Nearby Shakespeare & Co., the beloved and venerable English-language bookstore, has long housed writers, and after Friday’s attacks, it was a safe haven for patrons.)
“I continually remind myself,” Carroll wrote, “that I’m a guest here and that I’m on the periphery of any big discussion like this. I’m probably going to try to keep the conversations in the shop as lowkey as possible, but it will be interesting to see how my regular clients are dealing with all this.”