Thread by @BlackwellsHH

A Lost Place Found: A Thread.

About 5 years ago me and my girlfriend were in Paris. It was pouring with rain and we were looking for shelter.

We came across an alleyway leading to a courtyard, so we ducked in.

That's when we noticed there was a shop in the courtyard...

Oh man, it was wild. It was like a mix between a 2nd hand bookshop and a mad archivist's attic. There were theatre programmes from the 19th century. Gilt-edged invitations to parties that happened in the 1930s. Books, newspapers, photographs, stacked from floor to ceiling.

We spent a while in there. At one point I found an envelope of photos from a disposable camera. I looked through them and they were all candid shots of the Beatles. Mad.

Then we left. And 2 years later, we were in Paris again and we thought we'd go back, except-

It was gone.

Now I know it probably wasn't actually gone. But we looked so hard, for so long that there is still a piece of me that straight up thinks it Tardis-ed it's way out of that courtyard as soon as we left.

So that was it. I thought I'd never go back there. Until a few weeks ago.

My partner was looking through some old papers, and she found a flyer. A flyer from the shop, that she'd forgotten she had, but was enough of a genius not to throw away.

A flyer with a map on it.

That showed the location and the name of the shop.

La Galcante

So now we know where it is. And it just so happens we were going to Paris for the bank holiday weekend, this weekend just gone.

So...

Here is the alleyway.

Here is the door.

And here, folks, is La Galcante:

This is a photographic plate from 1906. There were a whole box of these, just loose.

Every wall is full of these boxes. Categories range from 'Freedom of the Press' to 'Milk Products'.

This is a little book from 1929 cataloguing sugar merchants and refineries. I found this under a copy of Rolling Stone from 1971.

This was in a box marked 'MLK, Bob Marley, Reggae'. Them someone had also scrawled 'Angela Davis' in biro on there as well. It's a newspaper from two days after MLK was assassinated.

This was literally ON THE FLOOR.

It's a newspaper from Sep 10th, 1939. For context, that's 9 days after Hitler invaded Poland, and a week after Britain and France officially declared war on Germany.

This place is amazing, and despite what I semi-thought for about three years, it is actually real and not just a hallucination I had after eating too much brie. And now I know it exists, I can strongly suggest you check it out if you are ever in that part of the world.

The End.