But its closing was no exception. From 2000 to 2014, 28 percent of Paris bookstores closed, according to a 2015 report from the Paris Urban Planning Agency, a body assembled by the City Council in 1967 to chart social and economic evolution in the French capital. Crippling rent increases in Paris’s densely populated center were mostly to blame, as well as growing competition from e-commerce sites that are able to offer far more titles than a cramped city bookstore. The decline in sales of newspapers and magazines also contributed, since these are often sold alongside books in French bookstores.

Image The Espresso Book Machine is made by On Demand Books, which chose the name as a nod to an activity that can be completed in the five minutes it takes to print a book: Have a quick coffee. Credit... Dmitry Kostyukov for The New York Times

The Latin Quarter, which has the highest concentration of bookshops in the city, was among the worst-hit areas. In an effort to protect the neighborhood’s unique character — and prevent so-called blandification — the Paris City Council in 2008 made it the center of its Vital’Quartier program. The program buys retail spaces across Paris, renovates them and rents them to small culturally significant enterprises at far below market rates. Les Puf was leased one of these spaces on Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, allowing it to reopen in March just a few blocks from where it closed.

“We’re already thinking about opening in other big cities in France — in university towns like Lille, Bordeaux and Lyon,” Mr. Gaudefroy said. “After a few weeks of business, there’s a real commercial motivation for doing so because, well, we’re selling a lot of books. A lot more than predicted. We thought we’d sell 10, 15 books in a day, but it’s been more like 30 or 40.”

“It’s an investment, but if it’s well managed, it can be very profitable,” Mr. Gaudefroy said. Along with the low rent for its retail space and the elimination of the cost of overproducing books that may not sell, Les Puf benefits from an affordable two-year lease on the Espresso Book Machine from the French printing association Ireneo. And France’s fixed-book pricing law, which prohibits anyone from selling books at a discount, means Les Puf can charge the price set by the publisher for each book. “A lot of publishers I know are interested in the idea, especially when we tell them how little it costs us,” Mr. Gaudefroy said.

So far, the store has relied on foot traffic and the pull of the machine’s novelty to draw customers, but a social media and leafleting campaign aimed at students — Les Puf’s original demographic — is planned.

Les Puf’s success is not an anomaly. Times are still tough for brick-and-mortar shops, but signs of a recovery are widespread. In the United States, sales in physical bookstores rose by 2.5 percent last year, the first increase since 2007. In Britain, the largest chain bookseller, Waterstones, announced a return to profitability at the end of last year after the arrival of the indie book-selling success story James Daunt as managing director.