The museum bookstores are the only ones not to have reopened their doors

If the Festival of the bookstore is to celebrate Saturday April 24 the return to favor of these essential stores, while blowing out the candles of the forty years of the Lang law – and the single price of the book -, the bookstores of the museums are always gloomy. And for good reason, their fate is sealed to that of museums, and these shops have kept doors closed since the end of October 2020.

Only the bookstore at the Musée des arts décoratifs, which benefits from direct entry on rue de Rivoli, in Paris, without having to go through the museum to enter, was authorized to reopen from Saturday 24. April, weekends, from 11 am to 6.30 pm Arteum, which has been running this place since 2013, will only sell exhibition catalogs and books, and not design objects.

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The year 2020 has been particularly appalling for the main player in this sector, the RMN-Grand Palais – which has thirty-three museum shops in France, including those of the Louvre, Orsay, the Musée des beaux-arts. de Lyon or the Center Pompidou bookstore, which was previously managed by Flammarion.

Inaccessible stocks

“The turnover of our bookstores / shops fell by 64% in 2020 to 23.4 million euros, due to periods of confinement and the sharp drop in tourist traffic during the summer” explains Nathalie Blanc-Guelpa, Deputy Director of Financial Affairs. And 2021 risks being at the same low water level, “Or even lower, she fears, depending on the reopening procedures and the number of visitors to the museums after more than six months of closure ”.

While some exhibitions have never been seen by the public, the catalogs have nevertheless sold a little online. This is the case for the exhibition planned at the Grand Palais, Black & white: an aesthetic of photography, which sold 3,000 copies at the end of March 2021. “We have postponed the publication of many books and the print runs have also been revised downwards”, explains Nathalie Blanc-Guelpa.

These bookstores have the particularity of paying a royalty to the establishment that hosts them.

Its main competitor, Arteum and its twenty sites (including the Quai Branly-Jacques-Chirac Museum, the City of Science and Industry, the Matisse Museum in Nice, the Mucem in Marseille, recently won against Actes Sud … ), saw its activity fall by 60%, to 6 million euros in 2020 according to Lorraine Dauchez, the founder and general manager. Not to mention the Eiffel Tower boutique, co-managed with a subsidiary of the Lagardère group, which saw its revenues decline by 70%.

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