Albertine Books

The story

Claude Lévi-Strauss picked the building. In 1952, the structural anthropologist persuaded the French government to purchase the landmark Payne Whitney House on Fifth Avenue, a Stanford White Italian Renaissance palazzo that now shelters something improbable: the largest collection of French-language books and translations from French in the United States. Albertine opened in September 2014 with over 14,000 titles from 30 French-speaking countries, named after a Proust character, conceived as a hub for Franco-American intellectual exchange. It still extends that reach, planting French Book Corners in independent bookstores across the country.