Au Bouquiniste Oriental

Already in the '50s, Egyptologists like Jean Yoyotte, Serge Sauneron, and Sergio Donadoni were going to the old Sharia bookstore Kasrl El-Nil, just a few steps away from the Egyptian museum in Cairo.

Today the top international names in Egyptology and others continue to visit the narrow and overflowing rooms of the Orientaliste. It is not a rare occurrence to run into Edda Bresciani, an Italian Egyptologist, who participated in digs in Medinet Madi, in Fayoum, intent on digging up the image of an impossible-to-find protome of a lion, or Luisa Bongrani, the first scholar in the world to found a professorship in Nubian Antiquities.

'Au Bouquiniste Oriental' was the name given in 1936 by Feldman, an Egyptian Jew, to this place, which was considered by researchers and collectors to be a precious mine of rare or untracable documents: reports from archaeological digs, written accounts and maps about tomb and temple findings in Egypt dating back to the early 1900s, but also volumes on Coptic, medieval and modern Egypt, which were accumulated slowly but surely by the three owners of the bookstore.

Over 50,000 volumes in all, only partly catalogued and scattered everywhere on bookshelves, in the basement storage room, the second floor; thousands of prints and engravings done by English, German, and French orientalists (including the famed David Roberts) who in the 19th century travelled throughout Egypt, Nubia, Palestine, Jordan, and Lebanon. Hundreds of maps, some of which date back to halfway through the 16th century, and dozens and dozens of old cards and photographs dating back to the early 1900s, stacked in random piles.