Lire à la Plage: French Seaside Libraries Serve Book-Loving Beach-Goers!

Do you see the redness in the featured image? Yasss! it’s a sign of Lire à la Plage, a booming services offered on the French coasts over the last decade. The service is offered by twelve French resorts where authorities have set up library beach-huts with orange slanted roof and red beach chairs. Open every day between 2pm and 7pm, from July 7 to Aug 26, each of the wooden huts has been equipped with 1,000 books, novels, poetry, and manga, for beach-goers of all ages. Since Normandy launched “Lire à la Plage” (Read At The Beach) project in 2005, the fantastic idea …

Guan-Ting Lin – July 30th, 2018

Book Culture

Do you see the redness in the featured image? Yasss! it’s a sign of Lire à la Plage, a booming services offered on the French coasts over the last decade.

The service is offered by twelve French resorts where authorities have set up library beach-huts with orange slanted roof and red beach chairs. Open every day between 2pm and 7pm, from July 7 to Aug 26, each of the wooden huts has been equipped with 1,000 books, novels, poetry, and manga, for beach-goers of all ages.

Since Normandy launched “Lire à la Plage” (Read At The Beach) project in 2005, the fantastic idea has prevailed and boomed in France and successfully attracts beach-going bookworms from all over the world (with their considerate translated versions). The Normandy site has attracted 38,000 bookworms last year, and the Herault site, the south of France, has attracted 21,000 readers last year, according to The Straight Times.

There’s only one rule in Lire à la Plage: the books cannot be taken off-site but can be reserved. Let the two librarians know which book you are reading and they will keep it aside from the open shelf so that you can enjoy the story the next day.

^{Image via Seine-Maritime}

Check this intro clip out. Gosh, I love to see the red brushes over the French coasts. I hope New York has one soon!