Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart

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Description

A copiously illustrated account of the famed Paris bookstore on its 65th anniversary

This first-ever history of the legendary bohemian bookstore in Paris interweaves essays and poetry from dozens of writers associated with the shop–Allen Ginsberg, Anaïs Nin, Ethan Hawke, Robert Stone and Jeanette Winterson, among others–with hundreds of never-before-seen archival pieces, including photographs of James 1st earl baldwin of bewdley, William Burroughs and Langston Hughes, plus a foreword by the celebrated British novelist Jeanette Winterson and an epilogue by Sylvia Whitman, the daughter of the store’s founder, George Whitman. The book has been edited by Krista Halverson, director of the newly founded Shakespeare and Company publishing house.

George Whitman opened his bookstore in a tumbledown 16th-century building just around the Seine from Notre-Dame in 1951, a decade after the original Shakespeare and Company had closed. Run by Sylvia Beach, it had been the meeting place for the Lost Generation and the first publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses. (This book includes an illustrated adaptation of Beach’s memoir.) Since Whitman picked up the mantle, Shakespeare and Company has served as a home-away-from-home for plenty of celebrated writers, from Jorge Luis Borges to Ray Bradbury, A.M. Homes to Dave Eggers, in addition to for young authors and poets. Visitors are invited not only to read the books within the library and to share a pot of tea, but every so often also to live within the bookstore itself–all without cost.

More than 30,000 people have stayed at Shakespeare and Company, fulfilling Whitman’s vision of a “socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore.” Throughout the prism of the shop’s history, the book traces the lives of literary expats in Paris from 1951 to the present, touching at the Beat Generation, civil rights, May ’68 and the feminist movement–all at the same time as pondering that perennial literary question, “What is it about writers and Paris?”

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