Le Somail: Finding a Children’s Book Among the Old Books (#709)
There are places where you go looking for something, and places where something seems to be waiting to find you.
Le Somail, on the Canal du Midi, turned out to be one of the latter.
We had arrived there aboard the barge boat Saraphina, traveling slowly along the canal through southern France. Le Somail is the sort of place that seems entirely comfortable with the passage of time. There is the old stone bridge arching over the water, boats tied quietly to the banks, enormous plane trees providing shade, and buildings that seem to belong as much to the canal as the locks themselves.
And then there is the bookstore.
Not just any bookstore.
Le Trouve-Tout du Livre.
(The find-everything bookshop).
It occupies a former wine cellar near the canal and contains tens of thousands of books: old books, second-hand books, rare editions, regional histories, maps, literature, children's books and all manner of printed treasures.
The current Aude tourism listing puts the number at around 70,000 volumes.
Walking inside is rather like entering an archaeological excavation conducted in paper.
Books rise from floor to ceiling. Shelves disappear into other shelves. Tables are covered with books. There are books behind books. The smell is unmistakable - paper, bindings, dust and age. It is a place that rewards wandering rather than searching.
I expected to find history.
Perhaps an old volume about Pierre-Paul Riquet and the construction of the Canal du Midi.
Perhaps an antique map. Perhaps some forgotten account written by a traveler who had made this same journey a century or two before me.
Instead, I found a children's picture book.
And that stopped me.
There it was:
Julot sur le Canal du Midi.
Of all the books I might have discovered in an antique bookstore beside the Canal du Midi, this was the one that seemed to have been placed there especially for me.
The book, by Lionel Hignard and Françoise Lemonnier, follows a boy named Julot who joins his grandparents aboard their péniche (flat-bottomed canal boat) and travels along the Canal du Midi from Toulouse toward the Étang de Thau.
Along the way he learns about locks, boats, engineering structures, the history of the bateliers (ferrymen), and the animals and plants of the canal.
The current edition is illustrated by Nathalie Louveau and is intended for children from about seven years of age.
It is essentially a journey of discovery disguised as an adventure.
That idea felt very familiar.
I had just been doing much the same thing.
For days aboard Saraphina, I had been watching locks fill and empty, looking at bridges, photographing birds, learning about villages, wondering about the people who once worked the canal, and listening to stories about the extraordinary waterway through which we were moving.
Julot was doing it through the pages of a picture book.
I was doing it through the viewfinder of a camera and the deck of a barge.
Perhaps that is why the book immediately appealed to me.
A Picture Book in an Antique Bookstore
There was also something wonderfully incongruous about finding it there.
In a shop celebrated for old and rare books, surrounded by volumes that carried the patina of decades and sometimes centuries, I had not been drawn to an ancient leather-bound history.
I had found a picture book.
As someone who came rather late in life to writing children's picture books, I loved that.
Because children's books are sometimes treated as lesser books. They are placed in their own corner of bookstores, brightly colored and thin, while the serious books occupy the imposing shelves.
But a good children's picture book can do something quite remarkable.
It can take history, geography, engineering, natural history and human experience and compress them into a story that makes a child want to know more.
That is education at its best.
Not:
Here are some facts you should learn.
But:
Come with me.
Let me show you something.
That is precisely what Julot sur le Canal du Midi does.
Julot doesn't simply explain the canal.
He travels it.
And because he travels it, the child reading the book travels with him.
The Canal Through a Child's Eyes
The book was originally published in an earlier form and was substantially refreshed and reissued in 2016 with new illustrations. Its creators described it as a kind of documentary fiction, using characters and a journey to introduce readers to life on and around the canal.
I like that concept enormously.
A lock is interesting as a piece of engineering. But a lock becomes much more interesting when a child is standing aboard a boat watching the water rise around him.
A canal bridge is architecture. But it becomes an adventure when you pass beneath it.
A heron is an entry in a field guide. But it becomes memorable when you see one standing motionless beside the canal as your boat quietly passes.
Children learn through information.
But they remember through stories.
Two Journeys Along the Same Canal
Standing in that extraordinary bookstore in Le Somail, holding Julot sur le Canal du Midi, I realized that Julot and I had something in common.
We were both passengers. Both curious. Both looking over the side of a boat. Both wondering what was around the next bend.
There was, however, one rather significant difference.
Julot was a child traveling with his grandparents.
I am a grandfather who writes books for children.
Perhaps that was why finding this particular book, in this particular bookstore, on this particular journey, seemed like much more than buying a souvenir.
It felt like meeting a fellow traveler. Across age. Across language. Across the boundary between author and reader.
The Best Souvenirs
Travel inevitably produces souvenirs.
Photographs. Tickets. Maps. Restaurant cards. A bottle of wine. Something bought at a market and carefully wrapped for the journey home.
But the best souvenirs are sometimes objects that connect the place we visited with something already inside us.
For me, Julot sur le Canal du Midi did exactly that.
I had entered Le Trouve-Tout du Livre expecting the past.
Instead, among tens of thousands of old books, I found a children's picture book about curiosity, travel, nature, history and discovery.
In other words, I found something remarkably close to what I have been trying to do with my own children's books.
And perhaps there was one final lesson waiting on those crowded shelves.
We tend to think of an antique bookstore as a place where the past is preserved.
But books do something much more interesting than that.
Books allow one generation to speak to another.
An old person can open a children's book. A child can discover a 300-year-old canal. A grandfather can follow the adventures of a boy named Julot.
And somewhere between Toulouse and the Mediterranean, between an old wine cellar filled with books and a barge moving slowly beneath the plane trees, their journeys can briefly become the same.
I went into the antique bookstore at Le Somail looking at old books.
I came out carrying a children's picture book.
I think I found exactly the right book!
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