Hello, everybody. This is the Yearful Tower podcast. My name is Oliver G. And I want to talk to you about the

bookinists, the booksellers along the Sen River. Before anything, you have probably seen these

booksellers in the iconic green kiosks that line the Sen River. They've been in the news an awful lot

lately. And I want to recap that,

which is why I'm putting this episode out today. But also I want to go back and share my chat with

Sydney, one of the Bukinists from along the Sen River. But first, why is it in the news?

Okay, so the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games, the plan is the

athletes are going to come down on boats along the Sen River. The town hall said, well,

if we're going to do that, we're going to sell tickets to it. We're going to have a lot of people

down by the Sen looking at the water. These green boxes, these kiosks full with secondhand books,

should not be there. We need to remove them.

So this was news that really, really upset people. The plan was for a temporary removal of the boxes,

but not just the bookinists themselves, the booksellers, but a lot of people got really upset about it.

So much so that they had petitions to change the idea.

A lot of the booksellers themselves had little QR codes up so you could scan it and sign your name so that you didn't want it to happen.

And just this week, the president, Emmanuel Macron, has said,

you know what, keep them there. We're going to keep the booksellers on the riverside. So people

have been talking about a lot. Now you know if you didn't. And I thought it was a good chance to

share the time that I talked to Sydney, an American buccanist, probably the only American

Buchanist who I met back in 2019 and shared her story. So I called her last night and we had a long

chat about the whole thing. She said when she heard the news that they'd planned to take them down,

she was devastated. She said she was in tears. She couldn't believe it. She was down taking pictures of them

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