Coming up, the story of a bookseller in one of the world's most beautiful cities.

A literary thriller with a philosophical bent.

Plus our distraction of the week. I'm Mel.

I'm Dave. This is the Library of Lost Time.

If you are a subscriber to our free substack, you know that our summer vacation to Croatia, Italy, and Paris was very rudely derailed by COVID.

Yeah, we got about three days into about a 15-day vacation. Mel got a fever of about 102, and we spent the next couple of days trying to get back

to Prague. The delta between what that week was going to be and what it turned out to be was

enormous. But looking on the bright side, there were a couple of nice moments before everything

crashed and burned. Yes. We were able to visit one of my favorite bookshops.

It's in Venice.

It's beautiful.

If you pay attention to Instagram, Instagram will tell you that you should go to Libraria

Aqua Alta in Venice.

That's a used bookshop with stacks and stacks of books.

Some of them are displayed inside of a wooden boat.

At first, it looks really magical. But pretty quickly, you realize that the books are kind of waterlogged,

and it's impossible to find treasures, because it's kind of messy and overwhelming.

I love most used bookstores, and I know that it's divisive, but I don't care much for bookstores where everything is just kind of higglety-pigglty and jumbled up. Same. I like a curated used bookstore. Yeah. Having said all that, it is kind of a spectacle, so I'm not saying don't go. I'm saying don't go expecting to buy books. But I'm going to tell you where you can go to buy books. Libraria Studium. This is a beautiful little bookshop right around the corner from St. Mark's Basilica. When you're in the middle of St. Mark's Square and there's the pigeons and the throngs of Taurus, you would never imagine that there's a

magical haven for books just a couple of turns in the alleys away. Yeah. It's very calm and peaceful

and very civilized inside of there. The front room has a really nicely curated selection of

English language books, including shelves of

novels and nonfiction books about Venice. It's like a treasure trove of books about Venice.

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