I ride down the canal, morning sun on my face, down Quai de Jemmapes, narrowly avoid the cars coming the other way, cross over the bridge and skim down Quai de Valmy and up to République where I race alongside the traffic past the statue and cross over down into the Marais where people are already sipping coffee outside in the cafes that hold a footpath of sun. Chins up, faces leaning into the sun, skin soaking up the heat after many many deep dark months of winter and layers of clothes and now naked skin and sun. But I’m riding off to work, through the northern tip of the Marais, switching off down along Beaubourg, past the Pompidou in all its glorious gaudy colours, past lines of students waiting outside, and then alongside the police prefecture where I see the Seine. The muddy waters are golden and the ancient buildings and the blue sky above and the sun and the people still waking up, walking along hand in hand…I skim past hospital Hôtel Dieu and along the footpath opposite Notre Dame and its gargoyles to the bookshop.
The blossoms are out and obscenely pink in front of Shakespeare and Company. Large soft balls of flower. An hour before we open people are already waiting under the trees outside, or peering in the windows. I go and have a pain au chocolat and coffee at Café Pannis where I go every day before work. I am received with Salut! from all the waiters, bisses on the cheeks from two and sit at the counter to get my coffee, at the half-price counter price. I order a café allongée, pour a packet of sugar in and sip it down quickly while scanning Libération. It is finally Spring and Paris is young again.
George welcomes me to work gleefully yelling Hola! Hola! from the third floor window, pyjama-clad, with his crazed long hair, boyish grin and arms wide open as though he has just launched into a Lear-style monologue. Shakespeare and Company is ruled by this same George Whitman. He is 93 and has owned this 17th century building with its rambling jam-packed bookshop for 55 years. George is not senile in the least. He is perfectly healthy, speaks French, Russian, Spanish, Italian, and Chinese and still devours whatever new books are out, with a particular fondness for Noam Chomsky. He lives on the third floor apartment, walking up and down three flights of stairs to go shopping or get ice cream or the papers each day and stops into the bookshop, prowling around, making sure his daughter is keeping everything in order. I cajoul him to sit at the desk and sit he does, watching the world come in and go by as I jiggle the cash register over his legs, and squeeze out change for people buying books. They take photographs of this white-haired monarch on his throne, surrounded by his life’s works, his passion, his millions and trillions of books.
George’s Shakespeare and Company isn’t the original bookshop of the same name. Sylvia Beach, publisher of Ulysses, friend of Hemingway, first made the name famous. Then the Germans shut down this famous lending library during their occupation. George opened his anglophone bookshop initially calling it The Minstrel but before she died he asked Sylvia’s permission to call his shop Shakespeare and Company in her honour. She gave him a lot of her books as did Simone de Beauvoir and other famous writers.
While Sylvia Beach was known for her role in literary Paris in the 1930s and 1940s George mingled with a literary Paris further down the line. Henry Miller and Anais Nin used to come and have tea with George, and he still has a note upstairs in which Anais apologises for Henry’s bad manners. The Paris Review first started meeting in the shop. Then The Beats made their entry: Hunter S. Thompson, Bukowski and Ginsberg used to write and stay at the shop and Burroughs wrote The Naked Lunch upstairs. Richard Wright and James Baldwin were also locals.
After travelling around the world for years and staying with various people he met along the way, George wanted to share this same generosity of spirit. He has ‘Be kind to strangers lest they be angels in disguise’ mosaic-ed into the bookshop floor. George has welcomed over 50,000 young people to stay over the years and every one of them has written him a 1-2 page memoir. They’re all jumbled and yellowing in boxes upstairs in George’s studio.
Sylvia Beach Whitman, is now carrying on the tradition of her namesake. While her father is 93, she is 26. She manages her father’s beautiful shop and has every ounce of energy and passion as he does himself. Books are in her blood. She was born across the road in Hôtel Dieu, spent the first five years of her life on the knees of various writers, spending holidays in the south of France with the likes of Laurence Durrell. At six, she left the warm dusty bookshop for England and the stability it offered but once she was a woman, with the freedom to make her own decisions, she returned to Paris.
Sylvia has now been managing Shakespeare and Company for four years and while she has kept the overgrown dusty charm she has thrown light into the place. Writers and people passionate about books still stay in the bookshop, sleeping on one of the many beds either in the art or Russian section, or upstairs with the kids’ books. At any one time there are over five people there and in exchange they help out for a few hours putting away books. George tells them they should read a book a day and when he sits on his throne he waves visitors to the back of the shop to climb up the stairs and linger in his library where you can sit and read for hours.
Sylvia is continuing to build what her father started so long ago. Every Monday night new and established writers come and read and if it’s warm and light, readings are held outside the bookshop, looking onto Notre Dame and the bouquinistes across the road.
Last year Shakespeare and Company hosted their second literary festival focused on travel writing in the park next to the bookshop. Over thirty authors from around the world came to speak, including Colin Thubron, Jon Ronson, Andreï Makine (the first author in France to ever win both the Prix Goncourt and Prix Médicis), Barry Lopez who won America’s National Book Award, William Dalrymple, Tim Parks and Geoff Dyer. The festival was sponsored by Granta (Ian Jack attended and chaired panels), Marie de Paris, Eurostar, The American University of Paris, Time Out as well as many other cultural organisations. On the last night of the festival in the Jardin du Luxumbourg, George received the Officier des Arts et Lettres from the French Government for his contribution to French cultural life. The next festival from 12th – 15th June 2008 is themed Real Lives: Memoir and Biography.
There are some who say Paris lives in the shadow of its past but if you ask me, Literary Paris is alive and well. I couldn’t think of anywhere I’d rather be than in Paris, surrounded by books, looking out to the blossoms and Notre Dame, stroking the black cat sprawled across the counter.
Shakespeare and Company can be found at 37 rue de la Bucherie 75005 Paris.
