I first met George Whitman in 2007 when he hit me over the head with a book.
I was in Paris, standing on the pavement outside the English language bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, talking to George’s daughter Sylvia, when a copy of Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, whizzed down from the third floor of the building. Direct hit – but intended for Sylvia, not me.
‘What does a man have to do to get some attention around here?’
I looked up, and there was George, ninety-three, leaning out of the window in his pyjamas, taking aim with another volume.
‘Dostoevsky! The Idiot! Ha Ha!’
Sylvia took my arm and checked my head. ‘Do you want to come up and meet Dad?’
We pushed our way through the crowded shop, Sylvia stopping every two seconds to answer a question or help a customer. She knows this place like a text she’s learned off by heart, which in a way she has, because the codes of her DNA are half of George, and written through her are the continuing lines of this great adventure with books.
The books are piled over two floors – the ground floor deep and open, stacked with new and in-print titles, the upper floor a warren of second-hand volumes, anything from Gibbon to Hemingway. There’s a library space for sitting and reading because this shop isn’t a pay-n-go Anglo Saxon business model, it’s a place for the browser and the flaneur. You pass the time here, in the company of books.
Perched above all this, like an old eagle, is George Whitman himself. He used to sleep on a mattress in among the books, but along the way he managed to buy the apartment upstairs, and now he lives his book-lined life with a bed, a sink, a bath, a table, and an ancient stove, the stew pot steaming up the windows and fogging the view across to Notre Dame. George likes cooking for his family – he has only one daughter, but a big boisterous ever-changing family, and that’s the way its been since 1951, when the de-mobbed GI, who had chosen Paris as his home, decided to open a bookstore.
‘After the war, I was living in a hotel on the Seine, very cheap in those days, and the landlord wanted to get us out and make more money, so he bust all the locks on the doors, but I figured this was a good thing, as now anyone could come and go in and out of my room and borrow books. I always had a pile of books. I’d come back from my errands and my room would be full of people I didn’t know, reading my books.’
George’s first bookshop was on a barge, but the books got damp. Then, in 1951, with a tiny inheritance of $500, he was able to buy the boarded-up grocery store that became the first part of the jigsaw of buildings that is now Shakespeare and Company.
It wasn’t Shakespeare and Company then. For ten years the shop was called Le Mistral. George has always loved the idea of people blowing in and out from around the world; people, ideas, energy, excitement. For George, books are the ultimate portable object. Books are not stock, stuff, units, commodities; they are exchanges of energy, they shift things and they need to be passed around. He believes in lending and borrowing books, not just selling them. That’s the thing about George – he’s a believer, and out of what he believes, he’s made a world.
He held out his hand to me, his eyes blue as a kitten’s and wily as a dragon’s. ‘Why don’t you stay in the writers’ room and write another book? You know how we do things here?’
I began to find out.
Way back, in 1913, when George was getting himself born, the original Shakespeare and Company was opened by a young American called Sylvia Beach. Her shop in rue de l’ Odeon soon became the place for all the English speaking writers in Paris. Her lover, Adrienne Monnier, had the French bookstore across the road, and she and Sylvia Beach ran back and forth, finding penniless writers a place to stay, lending them books, arranging loans, taking their mail, sending their work to little magazines, and most spectacularly, publishing James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922 when no-one else would touch it.
Hemingway was a regular at the shop, and writes about it in his memoir A Moveable Feast. His spare, emotional prose – the stripped-out language balancing the intensity of feeling - makes a poignant story of those early days, when material things weren’t so important, and if you could get time to read and write, and live on cheap oysters and coarse bread, and sleep by a stove somewhere, then you were happy.
It was Hemingway, as a Major in the US Army, who at the liberation of Paris in 1945, drove his tank straight to the shuttered Shakespeare and Company, and personally liberated Sylvia Beach.
‘No-one that I ever knew was nicer to me’ he said later, rich, famous, and with a Nobel prize.
But after the war, Sylvia Beach was older and tired. She didn’t re-open the shop that had been forced into closure by the Occupation. It was George Whitman who took over the spirit of what she had made – but not the name – until 1962, when Beach was at a reading by Lawrence Durrell, at George’s bookstore, and they all agreed that it should be re-named Shakespeare and Company.
George took in the Beat poets, Alan Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. Henry Miller ate from the stewpot but was too grand to sleep in the tiny writers’ room. Anais Nin left her Will under George’s bed. There are signed photos from Nureyev and Jackie Kennedy, signed copies of Kerouac and Burroughs.
George opened his doors midday to midnight, and the deal then is the deal now, in all its glorious anarchic creativity: Sleep in the shop, on tiny beds hidden among the bookstacks, work for two hours a day helping out with the running of the place, and crucially, read a book a day, whatever you like, but all the way through, unless maybe it’s War and Peace, and then you can take two days.
George still reads a book a day, and he gets very cross if he hears that anyone is wasting his time. You can be bawled out of Shakespeare and Company just as suddenly as you are invited in. The spirit of the place has to be honoured, and there are no exceptions.
At any time there are six or more young people from the compass points of the world, reading, talking, thinking, boiling spaghetti in the kettle, running across the road to the public showers, stacking, carrying, selling, stock-taking, and all in a spirit of energy and enterprise that is not to be found in any chain bookstores. They stay for two weeks or two months, and some just sleep outside on a bench until there’s room inside.
If you are a published writer, then you might be able to stay in the tiny pod of the writers’ room, and huddle against an ancient plug-in radiator and not worry too much if the electricity goes down and you have to abandon your laptop for a note-pad.
‘There was no running water, no electricity when we started’ says George. ‘It didn’t matter. That stuff doesn’t matter. Books, people, ideas, that’s what matters.’
You can’t help loving him for it. And just now, panicked as we are by the money-monster we made, a wider audience than book lovers should find plenty to ponder in George’s values, which weight creativity against consumerism, and a life worth living against illusions of profit.
Thousands of people have come through his doors, slept in his shop, eaten at his table, and many of them still write to him, or return, because out in the world, in their various and scattered lives, they remember something important about how to live.
There’s nothing quaint or historicalised about Shakespeare and Company. The values, the ethos and hospitality doesn’t change, but the shop goes forward with the times. In 2006, aged 92, George retired, and his daughter Sylvia Beach Whitman, named after the great and original Sylvia herself, took over. She was 25 – an age difference that tells you a lot about George, his appetites and his energies.
Sylvia had lived in the shop until she was 7, then, after her parents’ divorce, she went with her mother to be educated in England, graduating in History from University College London. It wasn’t her intention to take over the shop, but she was drawn back in, as a destiny, as she sees it now, and she has made it her life.
Which is very good news for the future.
 
‘When I first arrived we didn’t even had a phone and Penguin were threatening to cut us off for not paying their bills, so I had to run round St Michel looking for a pay phone and ring Accounts in Essex.’ She bursts with laughter. Not only is she very beautiful, but she laughs all the time, with all the good-humoured energy of youth. Nothing is a problem, everything is a challenge. She adores her father, and is absolutely committed to carrying on his legacy - but in her own way ‘Dad was furious when I took out one of the beds and installed a computer. When I told him we were going to start a literary festival and a publishing business, he said ‘Who’s gonna cook for all those extra people?’
The literary festival now runs bi-annually and the publishing company will begin later this year as an on-line and in-print venture, recognising that Sylvia’s generation and younger, have webbed fingers and will float on-line as easily as they will immerse themselves in a book.
She’s buying another bit of the jigsaw too, so that the shop can start a café next door. It will mean borrowing money, and looking for new investors, but Sylvia is unsentimental about what it will take to stay in business. ‘At present small bookshops in France can thrive because the chains aren’t allowed to undercut the cover price of any title by more than 5%. But Sarkozy doesn’t like that, and if he changes the rules, we’ll be in the same position as all those independent stores in England. So we need to diversify now.’
Every Monday night at Shakespeare and Company, there’s a free reading by a published writer, while writers-in-progress, as George calls young hopefuls, can meet in the library to read their work. Patrick Keogh, a dynamic 30-something at Faber and Faber UK, has got together with Sylvia to offer Creative Writing weekends at the bookshop, and these are heavily over-subscribed.
I know that everyone wants to be a writer, but while there are plenty of readers who are not writers, they are no writers who are not readers, and one of the great gifts of this extraordinary bookshop is to keep writers and readers on the same creative continuum. Writers are not reduced to small-time semi-celebrities, and readers are not patronised as consumers. We’re all in it together, as part of what we love, the exuberant, imaginative, counter-force of books.
As Sylvia says, ‘We sell books for a living, but it’s the books that are our life.’
Shakespeare and Company
37, rue de la Bucherie, Paris France.
Open 10am till 11pm 7 days a week.
Website: www.Shakespeareandcompany.com
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