Tale of A Paris Bookstore: Wine, Writers & Le Bohéme

[3113]

This is a very cool article on the famous Paris Bookstore: Shakespeare & Company. It not only relates the eccentric history of the place and its bohemian owner (Whitman, an American), but also tells the really nice story of how Whitman's estranged daughter reconnected with her dad and is carrying on his legacy.

Here's an excerpt:

Curling photos of Shakespeare and Company habitues decorate crooked, aging walls. From unpublished poets to drunken literary enthusiasts to a French railway worker, many slept on the makeshift beds squeezed between shelves of musty books.

In addition to being a charming spot for tourists, expats and artists to spend rainy afternoons, the place has long been an unpredictably mad, theatrical universe of its own, thanks to George Whitman's open-door philosophy, which focused less on selling books than on gathering readers under the store's cracked and peeling roof.

Whitman used to say he offered beds to strangers "lest they be angels in disguise." Rather than focus on the writing they were half-expected to do, along with helping in the shop, they and the proprietor shared bottles of cheap wine and stories late into the night. By day, they tasted Whitman's tea and the glue-like pancakes he made for Sunday brunch.

Ah, those were the days for readers and writers! Join me in a bottle of cheap wine, my fellow authors?

 

[voluptuary_manque]

And when it's empty, don't forget to stick a candle in it. I like red but other colors will do.

As I said to HM after we'd both read the article, next time we're in Paris we will absolutely have to visit the place. I'm looking at a February. That's the only month you can get into the museums without standing in a mile-long line!

I don't do lines well . . .

 

[TE999]

Mmmmm...cheap wine and glue-like pancakes.

I love old bookstores and that one sounds really fascinating. Expatriates always seem to lead such interesting lives in Europe. The ones we hear about anyway.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Mmmmm...cheap wine and glue-like pancakes.

I love old bookstores and that one sounds really fascinating. Expatriates always seem to lead such interesting lives in Europe. The ones we hear about anyway.

The rest work for either multi-national corporations or the military and try to live as American as they can.

 

[TE999]

The rest work for either multi-national corporations or the military and try to live as American as they can.

I don't get that attitude. If you're in another country you should get to know it and the people, learn the language and be able to converse intelligently, sample the foods, observe the customs. make it a learning experience, not a sentence.

I went in the service and was looking forward to being stationed overseas. I wasn't.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

I don't get that attitude. If you're in another country you should get to know it and the people, learn the language and be able to converse intelligently, sample the foods, observe the customs. make it a learning experience, not a sentence.

I went in the service and was looking forward to being stationed overseas. I wasn't.

I was. And I developed a love for Germany that hasn't lessened to this day. Ah, to be young and a student at Heidelberg!

 

[lisa123414]

I was. And I developed a love for Germany that hasn't lessened to this day. Ah, to be young and a student at Heidelberg!

I was not stationed in Germany, but was privileged with hosting a German au pair. Through her I also developed a love for Germany.

 

[TE999]

I was. And I developed a love for Germany that hasn't lessened to this day. Ah, to be young and a student at Heidelberg!

That's one of the countries I wanted to see. I wanted to see all of Europe and the UK. I saw Texas, Mississippi, Colorado and Maine instead.

No damn wonder I didn't re-up.

 

[oggbashan]

That's one of the countries I wanted to see. I wanted to see all of Europe and the UK. I saw Texas, Mississippi, Colorado and Maine instead.

...

This month I've been to parts of France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Og

 

[TE999]

This month I've been to parts of France, Belgium and the Netherlands.

Og

That's right, rub it in.

You're a helluva lot closer to them than I am, too, so there.

(j/k)

 

[voluptuary_manque]

That's right, rub it in.

You're a helluva lot closer to them than I am, too, so there.

(j/k)

Yeah, for Ogg to visit the Benelux is like you going to Georgia or Tennessee.

Europeans have a hard time internalizing just how big the US is.

 

[Verdad]

We wanted to do Morocco this spring. At least, that was the plan in January. In the meantime I've somehow lost appetite for that entire part of the world! So, Easter at home it is.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

We wanted to do Morocco this spring. At least, that was the plan in January. In the meantime I've somehow lost appetite for that entire part of the world! So, Easter at home it is.

Good thinking.

 

[oggbashan]

Yeah, for Ogg to visit the Benelux is like you going to Georgia or Tennessee.

Not even that far. From landing in Calais, France at 12 noon, I was in Rotterdam by 4.30 pm, having driven all through Belgium, and I wasn't driving fast. Including checking in at Dover, loading and unloading from the ferry, it took me six hours from England to Rotterdam.

Europeans have a hard time internalizing just how big the US is.

Not me. I've toured parts of outback Australia. Some of my relations own cattle and sheep stations. One cattle station one of my relations worked on for a short time in the 1950s was bigger than Belgium.

Australia? Think US size most of it without towns or people.

Og

 

[TE999]

Not even that far. From landing in Calais, France at 12 noon, I was in Rotterdam by 4.30 pm, having driven all through Belgium, and I wasn't driving fast. Including checking in at Dover, loading and unloading from the ferry, it took me six hours from England to Rotterdam

Og

That sounds like driving through New England. If you lean on it you can cross four or five state lines in one day.

I'd like to take the Chunnel to Europe. That would be cool.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

Chunnel? No thanx! I won't even take the BART under the Bay when I'm up north. Claustrophobic is this bear. And being in a tunnel under hundreds of feet of water? I'd need a sedative, maybe two!

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

Those who enjoy going native have never been to any of the worlds shitholes.

 

[sr71plt]

Those who enjoy going native have never been to any of the worlds shitholes.

"Going native" is relative to location; it's not a universal backwater somewhere. Going native in Paris would be nice, but expensive--and easier to do if you spoke French. I admit it wouldn't be anything like a trailer park in the suburbs of Tampa, though.

 

[TE999]

Chunnel? No thanx! I won't even take the BART under the Bay when I'm up north. Claustrophobic is this bear. And being in a tunnel under hundreds of feet of water? I'd need a sedative, maybe two!

Tunnels don't bother me. I've been through the Holland Tunnel and the Chesapeake Bay Tunnels a few times and the three of them are each over a mile long underwater. Piece of cake. What the hell, if your time's up, it's up no matter where you are.

 

[estragon]

The present Shakespeare & Co. is not the Shakespeare & Co of the 1920s, when Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach hosted Hemingway, Joyce and Ezra Pound. But it is worth a trip to see. Germany was always fun (I've been there four times). Never in the military, though; my military time out of the US was in Vietnam in 1969, and you can keep it. Going native there was no option.

 

[voluptuary_manque]

The present Shakespeare & Co. is not the Shakespeare & Co of the 1920s, when Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach hosted Hemingway, Joyce and Ezra Pound. But it is worth a trip to see. Germany was always fun (I've been there four times). Never in the military, though; my military time out of the US was in Vietnam in 1969, and you can keep it. Going native there was no option.

I bless my lucky stars that I never got further west than Baker's Beach, San Francisco when I was Active. In Reserves I got to Korea several times and Thailand. Now there's a neat country even if you aren't chasing women the size of an American sixth grader. Let me tell you, that was all it took to keep me on straight and narrow. Adult women as small as my students? Uh-uh!

 

[3113]

The present Shakespeare & Co. is not the Shakespeare & Co of the 1920s, when Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach hosted Hemingway, Joyce and Ezra Pound.

According to the article, Whitman created this Shakespeare & Co in homage to the one created by Sylvia Beach, and he got Burroughs and Ginsberg. Personally, if I had a time machine, I'd rather hobnob with them then Hemingway, Joyce or Pound. Willy and Allan had better drugs and far more interesting sex lives

 

[oggbashan]

In the ten years that I ran my secondhand bookshop I did have several authors that would drop in for coffee and a chat.

Unfortunately they were all writing Mills and Boon-type romance or obscure local histories and none of them ever had any money, which is why they bought their books from me.

Before that when I was working in another owner's bookshop we had several known authors who would visit but the owner usually took them to the local pub. The only "name" I dealt with regularly was an author who was a descendant of Roget, of Roget's Thesaurus.

Og