The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: The Hidden World of a Paris Atelier Book + PRICE WATCH * Amazon pricing is not included in price watch

The Piano Shop on the Left Bank: The Hidden World of a Paris Atelier Book

At first glance, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank is simply an autobiography covering the author's blissful years in Paris. This is actually something much rarer and more original: an extended love letter to the piano. One day, Carhart was walking through the back streets of Paris in the early morning--a place and a time he evokes beautifully, the street sweepers out cleaning the hidden alleys, and ...the smell from la boulangerie du coin. And then he noticed a small truck, unloading a piano ... It turned out to be delivering to the atelier of Monsieur Luc Desforges, a piano repairer of the old school. 'Desforges Pianos: outillage, fournitures.' On the small, red felt-covered shelf in the window are displayed the tools and instruments of piano repair: tightening wrenches, tuning pins, piano wire ... the entire facade has a sleepy, 19th-century charm about it. One could say the same of Carhart's book. It doesn't move fast, and it doesn't depend on powerful emotions or dramatic reversals for its effect. It is a quiet and loving meditation on the piano, as it features in French life, and in Carhart's. He recalls his early days back in Virginia with equal vividness, when at the age of eight he took lessons from Miss Pemberton, playing a Chopin ballade or a Mozart sonata "in the warm Virginia evening, with the soft murmur of crickets in the surrounding woods". The whole book is suffused with just this softness, slowness and dreamy eloquence. For piano lovers, an absolute must. For others, a book of tremendous charm and pleasure. --Christopher Hart Read More

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  • Amazon

    Ever since the piano was invented, people have longed to own one. In the nineteenth century, an age without recorded music or television, this craze reached its apex. When Thad Carhart discovered Luc and his hidden cache of pianos in the dusty repair shop on his street in Paris, his life changed.

  • Foyles

    T. E. Carhart, an American living in Paris, is intrigued by a piano repair shop hidden down a street near his apartment. When he finally gains admittance to the secretive world of the atelier, he finds himself in an enormous glass-roofed workshop filled with dozens of pianos. His love affair with this most magical of instruments and its music is reawakened. Packed with delicate cameos of Parisians and reflections on how pianos work and their glorious history, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank is an atmospheric and absorbing journey to an older way of life.

  • BookDepository

    The Piano Shop On The Left Bank : Paperback : Vintage Publishing : 9780099288237 : 0099288230 : 01 Jun 2001 : Carhart, an American living in Paris, is intrigued by a piano repair shop hidden down a street near his apartment. Packed with delicate cameos of Parisians and reflections on how pianos work and their glorious history, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank is an atmospheric and absorbing journey to an older way of life.

  • 0099288230
  • 9780099288237
  • T.E. Carhart
  • 1 June 2001
  • Vintage
  • Paperback (Book)
  • 256
  • New edition
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