A character in a Julian Barnes novel, having experimented with various positions from the Kama Sutra, concludes that, maybe, after all, the old missionaries knew a thing or two. In a similar vein, I’m well on my way to concluding the French know a thing or two about books.

I’m not a bookworm; I am, to hijack a German term, a reading rat. In my bestiary, a bookworm doesn’t just like reading; she likes printed books in themselves – holding them, keeping them, buying first editions when the pocket permits. A reading rat loves reading too but is almost indifferent to the vehicle: printed book, electronic copy, street sign, cereal box, pharmaceutical contraindications… Reader, I read them all.

So I was initially resentful when I learned of the French law, coming into effect next year, which is designed to set a minimum price for book deliveries. The price itself is still under negotiation but the obvious target is the online booksellers – Amazon first but there are many others – that provide virtually free delivery.

Why resentful? Because it could catch on. Other European countries may decide to follow France and the measure will raise the price of ordered books.

You’d think that in France, where some 435 million books were sold in the last year before the pandemic, 20 per cent online, readers would be up in arms. The government recognises the clout of readers. During this year’s spring lockdown, books were declared an essential item and bookshops thus remained open.

The new law will protect small independent booksellers – 3,500 of them, employing an average of four persons each. France already fixes the prices of books to prevent huge discounts (the maximum is five per cent) by Amazon and the giant bookstores. Now readers will have to fork out more to protect 12,000 jobs.

Among the fractious political parties, consensus reigns. You can trust La République to unite to lead the resistance against Amazon. But even readers seem happy. How come?

Partly, it protects small independent publishers and quirky writers, who often are only housed in small bookshops. The diversity of shop defends diversity of thought. That I can accept.

But the larger official answer is that bookstores are an important meeting place in provincial town centres or city neighbourhoods. They are said to represent important forms of community.

This isn’t false. In Brussels, two years ago, when the small bookseller, Nijinsky, needed to move (the rent was jacked up), clients helped with the packing – the shop was an important feature of the Châtelain neighbourhood.

It’s also true of bigger (but still independent) shops, which are associated with popular cafés and restaurants – their own or right beside them. Kramers in DC and Filigranes in Brussels have their own; L’Écume des Pages in Paris has Les Deux Magots and Café de Flore on either side of it.

A small bookshop can surprise you, bringing together, in the space of a glance, ideas you never expected- Ranier Fsadni

Eating with books around you imparts a sense of communality. In Maastricht, the Boekhandel Dominicanen goes further: a bookshop built in a former grand church. In this cathedral of browsing, where the top floor is right near the roof, readers are almost communicants, the scent of incense replaced by the smell of paper, the heads bowed in prayer replaced by noses buried in bestsellers.

I can see the point. But it can be taken too far. Take the Parisian bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. It was, once, a browser’s oasis on the Left Bank. Today, it is a shrine pullulating with pilgrims, trampling over each other, who are there primarily to take selfies despite the signs forbidding it.

The books have become talismans. The experience has become a commodity. It’s not a meeting place. It’s a tourist trap.

As a reading rat, at first I thought the French are making a fetish of the bookshop as meeting place. Too nostalgic a view, I thought. Then I happened to go through an airport bookshop and a small independent bookshop, in quick succession. Reader, I converted.

It was the contrast that did the trick. The airport bookshop presents bestsellers to readers who aren’t browsing but grazing – intellectual snacking – or picking up a gift in a hurry. The experience – like much of the rest of our lives – is transactional or escapist, undergone while on the way to somewhere else. A giant bookstore, in an emporium selling a host of other information and entertainment goods, is a similar experience.

The great independent bookstores are different. In an overstimulated world, they remain an oasis of silent meditation and dreamy focus.

In our working lives, we read narrowly focused texts with straightforward purpose. Browsing through Amazon, we come across the kind of book we’re looking for. But a small bookshop can surprise you, bringing together, in the space of a glance, ideas you never expected.

In a great shop, it feels that it’s the books that find you, calling out your name. Our thrills, astonishment, pleasures and disappointment are a reminder that we read with our bodies, not as brains in vats. We read as animals.

Apart from the bookworms and the rats, there are the squirrels, collecting a pile and carrying them off to a quiet corner. There are the elephants, who buy one book after having memorised the contents of three others, and the butterflies, in colourful unreaderly clothes, flitting from one shelf to another.

The bears look up longingly at the honey on the top shelves, ready to climb. The lions read because they feel they have a book in them too. The phoenixes, in the self-help and memoir sections, feel ready to rise again.

In a world drowning in information, the small independent bookshop takes the place of Noah’s ark, where we take refuge from the flood.