avril 2024 - FUSAC Paris Classifieds

Rio Soléy Design

Rio Soléy is the designer behind the hand drawn Paris map that helps people see that Bill & Rosa's Book Room is not far at all from Paris center. We love her work which is both elegant and whimsical at the same time. Her journey in lettering started at the age of 5 when her parents enrolled her in a calligraphy class. Since then, she's been captivated by the intricacies of letterforms and the artistry involved in evoking diverse emotions through them. She tells us a bit more about herself and her art, including her beautifully thought out and crafted IRO print collection. Can you tell us a bit about yourself? Hello! I’m Rio Soléy, a digital artist & designer specialised in lettering. I create and sell art prints that evoke optimism, simplicity, and tranquility. I’m from Japan, but I’ve lived in Canada, the UK, Germany, and now in France. When I’m not creating art prints, I’m painting letters on store signs and vitrines to help shop owners in Paris stand out …

Reflections from an old timer in Paris: La Sécu

Reflections from an old timer in Paris: La Sécu The first time I took my toddler to a see a doctor in Paris many, many years ago, I received a prescription a mile long. Back in the 1980s antibiotics were given for every ailment (common sense has since prevailed) but there were other, strange sounding names such as sérum physiologique, a saline solution for squirting up the nasal passage, unpleasant but efficient for blocked-up noses, and le suppositoire for a different passage, which actually proved useful for small children, but neither of which were in common use in Britain at the time. click to listen We had just arrived from Hong Kong and hadn’t a bean. Not even the La Sécu, since to obtain a social security number one had to be working, if not born in France. But someone had told me about the PMI, Protection Maternelle et Infantile, which, at the time anyway, provided free medical care for mothers and babies. Perhaps the doctors there were just being kind by a…

Interview with Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Fiona Sze-Lorrain is a poet, literary translator and musician. She writes and translates in English, French, and Chinese and is the author of several poetry collections and most recently a novel in stories, Dear Chrysathemums, published by Scribner in 2023. Longlisted for the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, the novel celebrates diversity and women and features deeply compelling Asian women who reckon with the past, violence, and exile—set in Shanghai, Beijing, Singapore, Paris, and New York. Fiona lives in Paris and we were thrilled to welcome her in February to the Book Room, where she talked about her novel. If you missed her event, you can read the questions we asked and Fiona’s answers below: Bill & Rosa: You are a musician and a poet, you have published several collections of poems, I was wondering what was the determining factor in your decision to write a novel? Was it a character, or a story that you felt needed to be told? Fiona Sze-…

Are You Becoming French?

Are You Becoming French?The French say that foreigners can never truly “become” French - no matter what legal status is inscribed upon what identity papers they carry around in their France-based wallets (1). Nor might newly minted citizens or official residents wish to swap their own cultural markers, manners and mentalities for those of the local waiter who serves them their morning café au lait et croissant (to say nothing of totally being able to). But if you’re here long enough, your adaptation mirrors those Escher drawings where columns of black geese or fish on the left fly or swim straight across the page, migrating and mutating by imperceptible degrees, melting into and finally becoming their white counterparts on the right. To a greater or lesser degree, whether you expected to or not, one day you realize that you’re crossing to the other side. How do you know that you’ve arrived? When you (a very incomplete list): 1. sound as brilliantly amusing-funny-sarcastic-sn…

The Paris of Montana

The Paris of Montana - a Department Store It all started with a hat box we found in an antique shop in Montana. The box proudly displayed the slogan « The Paris of Montana » and of course we were intrigued. After quite a few years of researching every now and again we learned of a Dry goods store called Paris – in Montana. ‘Dry goods store’ is the collective noun for textiles and manufactured articles and can also include some non perishable grocery items such as tobacco, sugar, flour, and coffee. (A General Store which is a more common word, though similar, had all sorts of groceries, hardware and dry goods.) Dry goods were big business. Over one million people worked in the dry goods trades in the United States in the late 1800s ; there were hundreds and thousands of dry goods stores in American towns and villages. One such store was called The Paris Dry Goods store. It was in Great Falls Montana and originally established in 1894 as a partnership between two Rom…

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Mois: avril 2024

Rio Soléy Design

Reflections from an old timer in Paris: La Sécu

Interview with Fiona Sze-Lorrain

Are You Becoming French?

The Paris of Montana

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