Next month, after 30 years in business, the leading English-language Paris bookstore will close. For a generation authors like David Sedaris, Susan Sontag, Raymond Carver and Don DeLillo gave talks and readings at the store, the Village Voice, on one of the chicest streets of St.-Germain-des-Prés.

“When Stephen Spender gave a talk, Mary McCarthy was in the audience,” Hazel Rowley wrote in a 2008 essay on the bookstore. “One evening Edmund White introduced Jonathan Raban, with Bruce Chatwin among the audience.” But the Village Voice could not survive the deep discounting of Amazon and sellers of e-books.

The specter of loss hovered over a party there Saturday night, when hundreds of well-wishers crammed into the store and spilled out onto the narrow street to mourn its passing.

“I want you to know what a privilege it was to have you come and sit with me in my dark and cramped little den at the back of the bookshop, to chat, talk about books, about your own work and about life,” said Odile Hellier, the founder and owner. “I will dearly miss those moments and can only hope that there will be another dark little den where I can sit and share ideas, and all the rest.”

It may have to be in a French-language bookstore like L’Usage du Monde across town in the heart of a gentrifying neighborhood of the 17th Arrondissement, which will celebrate its first anniversary in August.

The owners, Katia and Jean-Philippe Pérou, received grants from the National Center of the Book in the Culture Ministry and the Paris regional government and an interest-free loan from a group with the unwieldy name the Association for the Development of the Bookstore of Creation.