Toulouse: “The Wild Camel” takes part in the book festival this Saturday
The 24th edition of the Independent Bookstore Festival will take place this Saturday, April 23 in more than 500 bookstores, including Le Chameau Sauvage, in Toulouse. This day of Sant Jordi is an opportunity for independent booksellers to reaffirm their fight to protect their profession and to publish their love of books with all readers.
This Saturday, “The Wild Camel” will participate in the 24th edition of the Independent Bookstore Festival, Sant Jordi. For the occasion, Aude and Elias Farès will offer a book specially published for this celebration (“We keep 10 for literature!”) or a rose “and offer books by Catalan authors”. A way for them to thank their customers “for their loyalty and trust”.
Aude and Élias Farès opened their generalist and independent bookstore, “Le Chameau sauvage”, in the premises of the former associative restaurant “Le bol rouge”, at 44 avenue des Etats-Unis, in the Minimes-Barrière district of Paris, In Toulouse. You enter this place, which is as charming as it is atypical, through a simple wooden door. Then, a long corridor leads to a first room filled with books, which also serves as a writing, watercolor, ukulele, sewing workshop… Then a second, to lead to a small tea room, lit by a canopy that overlooks a hidden garden. Everything is decorated with shelves overflowing with books and dotted with small pots of green plants. At the “Camel Sauvage”, we go from surprise to surprise. Here, the Farès couple have created a place in their image, “in which you feel at home. We had identified the need for this coffee shop in the neighborhood where people could buy a book and sit down for a drink,” says Elias.
For this, when they named their establishment, they opted for “a name that appeals”, taking into account the title of a novel by Philippe Jaenada. Moreover the author is the godfather of their bookstore, Respectively illustrator and director in the territorial public service, Elias and Aude Farès, both 45 years old, gave up their job to create this independent bookshop. It opened at the end of 2019, just before the Covid, then suffered all the upheavals of the health crisis.
During this troubled period, the couple was able to measure “the importance of local shops and the status of books. Here, it is we who have chosen the works that we offer for sale and thereby disseminate a certain number of values, of dreams… We also promote biblio-diversity”, notes Aude. Our booksellers also act as guides “by offering advice to their customers”.
In Toulouse, the Privat, Floury Frères and Ombres Blanches bookstores are also taking part in Sant Jordi this Saturday.