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You are a book blogger. You mention you are going to Paris. You know what the next question will be for it's the one that you would ask. No, it's not about the Louvre or the Eiffel Tower. It's not about food or fashion. It is a simple question, practically rhetorical because really, how could you answer in the negative.
"You are going to Shakespeare and Company aren't you?"
Well, yes I am. Yes, indeed.
For readers Shakespeare and Company is practically mythical. The original store was owned and run by Sylvia Beach. She operated the shop, which was located 12 rue de l'Odéon, from 1919 to 1941. It was famous for being the haunting ground of such writers as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce. In face, Sylvia Beach was the first publishers of Joyce's Ulysses, which you may love or loathe her for depending on if you have ever been forced to read it. Beach's original store was closed in 1941 while France was occupied by the German army. Rumor has it that the army closed it after Beach refused to sell a book to a German Army officer. The original store never reopened.
Ten years later, in 1951 George Whitman, an American, found himself in Paris and not wanting to leave. So he opened a bookstore in the 5th arrondissement, on Paris's Left Bank at 37 rue de la Bûcherie. At first called Le Mistral, that strong cold wind that blows through France each winter, after Beach's death the name was changed to Shakespeare and Company and the legend lived on. It became a haven to the likes of William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg. And it became famously known as a place where people could sleep in exchange for work in the store.
I don't remember the first time I heard about Shakespeare and Company or where - I may have been in my teens. But it became mythical. A bookish utopia. A place where everyone loved books and reading and you could even sleep there. To someone whose hometown didn't even have a bookstore it seemed like a magical place. I never sought out information but it came to be in bits and pieces over the years. Last June I found myself in downtown Toronto with a number of Toronto-area book bloggers. I had arranged the meeting because I wanted to meet up with some of these wonderful people whose blogs I enjoy before I moved away from the city. After gelato and coffee we, of course, found ourselves wandering across the street to the Nicholas Hoare bookstore, one of my favourite bookstores. Every time I go in there I find books I always wanted but never knew existed. This time the book was Time Was Soft There: a sojourn at Shakespeare & Co by Canadian Jeremy Mercer. (The staff ended up tracking down another copy for one of the other bloggers after they saw that I grabbed it...we're like that we book bloggers.)
Reading the book reawakened the fascination I had with the store. But also took away a bit of the glamour. The descriptions of the how they cleaned various bathrooms used by the inhabitants? Well...let's just say I don't want to sleep there anytime. It, however, also contained a wonderful history of the bookstore. And told the story of the reunion of George Whitman and his daughter Sylvia who now runs the shop. Yellow Hippo shared my obsessive reading of the book and wasn't able to put it down. And as Patterings reminded me, in some markets the book title is Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs.
One day about two weeks ago I found myself dragging my companion across Pont au Double in Paris. We had just come down from the very top of Notre Dame. I'll let you on a little secret - I don't do heights well. Nor do I do stairs well. I get vertigo and it can cause anxiety attacks but I go ahead and go up to the top of things anyway. It's not getting there that freaks me out, it's getting down. And I had just come down the 400 and whatever steps at the Cathedral and may have had a meltdown after safely reaching the bottom. I needed food and desperately needed a drink. I needed a restaurant and darn it nothing was going to stand in my way.
Across the bridge we went and there were restaurants in my sights and then I stopped. Suddenly, without really meaning to,
