A bookstore is the soul of an urban cultural landscape. The Old Bookworm Book Bar, located on Sanlitun South Street in Beijing, has received great praise from many media outlets for "praising a city with a bookstore". Old Bookworm is the most active foreign bookstore, library, and restaurant in Beijing, as well as the old place for Beijing talk shows, and the default venue for overseas actors to tour Beijing. In 2010, Old Bookworm was selected as one of the "Top 10 Bookstores in the World" by Lonely Planet, the world's leading travel book series, and was the only Asian bookstore to make the list. Other selected bookstores include the 60-year-old "City Lights" bookstore in San Francisco, the Teatro Atanneo Opera, Argentina, the century-old bookstore Leo Library in Porto, Portugal, the Shakespeare bookstore in Paris, the Dante bookstore in London, and the Berlin National Bookstore in Germany. The old bookworm is located in the middle of the Sanlitun bar street, facing the street but not noisy, and from the outside it looks like a big pink warehouse. Walking up the staircase full of famous books, you will be greeted by a sea of books - three spacious rooms with a total area of several hundred square meters and a ceiling height of at least 8 meters, 16,000 books are arranged from the ground to the roof that can only be reached by ladders, the curved bright orange canvas ceiling decoration, the romantic and agile piano, the colorful furniture, and the aroma of coffee cake, quite a petty bourgeois atmosphere. Old Bookworm is the foreign bookstore with the largest collection of books in Beijing, like a small library. At Bookworm, books can not only be purchased, but also borrowed with a membership card, or read directly in the store (consumption can only be sitting). There are three halls in the old bookworm room, and there is no tea house in the room, new books are only sold but not borrowed, and second-hand books are only borrowed but not sold. Follow the blackboard prompts out of the back room and up a few narrow staircases, where there is a large square terrace that is known as the "Secret Garden" – a banner that reads "Beijing Flea Market" and is a mini-market for the Old Bookworm Bookstore, where a few foreign stallholders sell crafts and jewelry, and customers can lean against the bar and chat. Two-thirds of the bookstore's member readers are foreigners, and they borrow the most novels, and the original or adapted novels of movies are always popular. Foreign readers also like to read books during their trips to learn about the relevant cultural background of the local area. In 2006, the old bookworm also settled in Suzhou and Chengdu, making it a teahouse style, quiet and leisurely. In old bookworms, it is common to meet big names face-to-face. Old Bookworm is not only a composite cultural space, but also has launched many cultural products to enrich the connotation of "bookstore", promoting the integration and development of Chinese and foreign language literature. Since 2006, the "Old Bookworm International Literary Festival" has been held every March, where authors, scholars, artists and performers from home and abroad can exchange ideas. The festival includes book clubs, symposiums, writing workshops, performances, writing and painting studios and interactive storytelling sessions for children, as well as Chinese programs that introduce international authors to Chinese readers, and avant-garde art projects that include music, photography and film elements. At present, the Bookworm International Book Festival has become a member of the World Book Festival Alliance, and many members from other alliance regions have accepted the invitation. The book festival has invited Irish writers Emma Donogou and Michelle Faber to come, the former was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for "Room", and the latter is considered the emerging "thriller master" of the United Kingdom; In addition, writers such as Ian Johansen, who won the Pulitzer Prize for journalism, and He Wei, who was shortlisted for the National Book Award, have also been invited. In October 2014, Bookworm and the EU Delegation to China jointly established the "European Flash Fiction 28" project, which brings creative short fiction works from 28 EU member states to Chinese readers. The old bookworm also established a publishing house in 2015, focusing on the translation and publication of contemporary Chinese literature. Independently publishes the English literary magazine Mala, which aims to recommend the latest translations by Chinese authors, as well as English works by foreign authors living in China and overseas Chinese. Gao Yan, the founder of Old Bookworm, likes bookstores with a human touch, and the clerks know the location of books well, so they don't need to be searched by computers, and they have an ancient feeling. Old Bookworm Catering mainly provides Western-style simple meals, pasta, sandwiches and other daily dishes. The coffee and meals are not very exquisite, but it doesn't hurt to fill your stomach, and there is no need to make a special trip. The busiest season in bookstores is spring and autumn, when the store is generally noisy, and the sound of cooking food and stirring coffee spreads in the lobby, which is a very bad experience. THE WI-FI CONNECTION IN THE LOBBY IS BASICALLY UNAVAILABLE, AND THE NETWORK SPEED IS EXTREMELY UNSTABLE. The space is not well lit, and although there are projectors above the seats, it doesn't help, and the reading experience is not good. Once there is a performance or event, the seats need to wait, and the environment will generally be noisy. Many customers think that the old bookworm is not a quiet place to read books, but more like a café full of books - however, in the market environment of consumption upgrading, the physical bookstore that can survive is already the best in the industry. Gao Yan, the owner of the bookstore, said that more than two-thirds of the old bookworm's income comes from catering. If you like cross-border integration and communication, and have an obsession with foreign original books, you will not be disappointed when you come to the old bookworm.