Richard Cobb 's Wonderful "The Streets of Paris"

I’m a fan of Richard Cobb’s writing, particularly his wonderful The Streets of Paris (1980), an illustrated account of several flâneurial walks that he and photographer Nicholas Breach took along some of Paris’s ancient backstreets. Cobb was an aficionado of peeling plaster, faded advertisements, dilapidated shutters, crumbling walls, dim staircases, and other manifestations of what today is sometimes called ruin porn. He was a superb describer. For example, here’s his depiction of the side of an apartment building in the Xme arrondissement:

Cadoricin and Delsol, to the accompaniment of accordion music, balmusette style, on Radio-Paris advertising, in the 1930s, the fading reminder of a disappearing social history, on the cut-off end of a tall apartment house as if from a scene of a Carné film: Shampooing Brillant à l’Huile, and with something already indecipherable about hair.

That musical reading of a faded ad on the side of an old apartment house is inspired! The whole book is inspired – a great testament to the pleasures of being a flâneur.