Craig Rodwell, owner of the Oscar Wilde Memorial Bookshop, reported watching police chase participants through the crooked streets, only to see them appear around the next corner behind the police.
Bookshops report many instances of people buying a dozen copies for family and friends.
On the night of the attack on Charlie Hebdo, a newly nominated chevalier of arts and letters, Simone Hisler, who runs a chain of bookshops, reported that one of her stores – Hisler BD, devoted entirely to comic-strip books – remained open five hours after its usual closing time, "everyone in tears, crying together".
One Berlin bookshop is reported to have sold out by noon on its first day of sale.
But some bookshops have reported a surprise reversal in the trend, with Waterstones boss James Daunt ending Kindle sales after saying ebook revenues had "disappeared to all intents and purposes".
Murakami said he was disappointed by reports that bookshops in China had been ordered to remove works by Japanese authors, as well as those about Japan by Chinese writers.
Meanwhile, Russian experts on Gogol have been incensed by reports that bookshops in Kiev are selling Ukrainian language versions of his novels in which nationalist-minded translators have replaced the phrase "The great Russian land" with "The great Ukrainian land".
Other bookshops are not reporting much in the way of bestselling soft porn.
Yet Criticas magazine reports that few bookshops are seeing a corresponding increase in sales of Spanish-language titles.
Not a single children's bookshop closed in 2011, said the report, despite a steady drop in the number of independent stores, with 73 closing their doors for good.
