| One of my favorite things about Saint Petersburg is that books are taken seriously here--at least, more seriously than in most of North America. For example, a great many people read books on public transit, whereas it is more common to see people looking at newspapers, business spreadsheets on their laptops, or video games on portable gaming devices on North American transit. (You see some of those here in Petersburg too, but books have a definite edge.) And when people here read books, they're usually reading "real literature": Old hardcover novels with time-worn bindings or reprints of the like, not vampire novels or books about economic crashes. Since I'm here and places for books are among my favorite places in the city, I thought I'd make a video showing some of the best places to browse books in Saint Petersburg. As usual, I didn't get any interior footage because I didn't want to be kicked out of any of these places, but this should give you at least an idea of what's available in the city. By the way, the final segment here, where I'm in front of the Bukvoed on Vasilievsky, was filmed earlier on, when I had done an initial tour of the bookshops in Petersburg and found them mostly taken over by Bukvoed; I was not even aware of the existence of Dom Knigi or the Krupskaya book marketplace until later, so if what I say at the end seems a little incongruous with everything else in this video, it's because it was filmed when I was young and ignorant. |
