Shakespeare and Company

If you could take just one photo: Shakespeare and Company

George Whitman, 95, is usually grumpy and anti-social. So when a chat with one of Shakespeare and Company's 'tumbleweeds'—the budding writers who work and sleep in the extraordinary English language bookshop—leads to an invitation upstairs to meet the owner of the shop of nearly 60 years, it is scary. He is in a good mood tonight, apparently. His tiny bedroom teems with books. He lies on a double bed eating pasta watching television and reading a book by John Pilger. We chat, even though he is half-deaf. A living link to the great era of the Latin Quarter amid walls echoing literary history, even if a good mood is as frequent as the full moon.

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Not far from the heart of Paris, Shakespeare and Co. juts out of the cobblestones, offering a brief refuge from the crowded art museums. Gummy fingers pluck through stacks of literature in the discount corrals. Inside, books bulge from the walls; patrons climb ladders. A wishing well, dug out of delicate tile, is filled with shiny coins. In the back, next to a staircase, sits an old piano with a taped piece of paper on its side. “Play Me,” it says. On Sunday afternoons, George Whitman, the 95-year old owner, who lives above the bookstore, opens his messy, chaotic home to host a tea party. Old tin pots lined with tea bags and a bowl full of Madeleine cookies quell the manic hands and mouths of world travelers as they cluster around his rickety table, indulging each other with their tourist tales.

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The small, narrow hallways inspire wonder, curiosity, perhaps even fear in its customers—who (or what) might be lurking behind that copy of Crime and Punishment? Upstairs, there's a black cat and a well-made bed—but who will sleep in it tonight? The bookstore's motto—"Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise"—means Allen Ginsberg and Henry Miller, among others, have found solace in the dusty corners and the well-read books waiting (perhaps waiting even for you) in the hallways of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore.

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