Time was soft there
A legendary bookshop in Paris is a place of discovery and sanctuary
Stores selling new books are the same all over;
shops selling second-hand books are nowhere
the same. Up-market bookstores look identical
and feel monotonous while second-hand bookshops
look different, feel different and smell different not
only from chain stores but also from each other.
Chain stores are neatly laid out, dust free, well lit,
sanitised and orderly; second-hand bookshops are
cluttered, dust laden and dank smelling. Most of
their clients are also different too. Shoppers at stores
selling new books move about in a bevy, are dressed
a la mode, carry swanky bags, ooze charm, want last
year’s best sellers, and often buy on advice of booksellers or near about shelf combers. Second-hand
book hunters are mostly loners, ill at ease with the
world with a strange other-worldly look, unhurried,
unceremonious, and elated and depressed at the
same time.
I love second-hand bookshops and I love the book
lovers and book hunters who float in and about
them, all those young and old, men and women—
queers, cynics, eccentrics, serious looking professors
and teachers, dismal looking versifiers, failed critics,
aspiring writers, successful professionals, lost souls,
half deranged vagabonds, deviants, drug addicts
and such and similar others—who rummage and
ransack second-hand book shelves as if in search of
some lost commandments. And nowhere else in the
world can you meet so many of them at one place
and all at the same time as at Paris’s famous English
language bookshop Shakespeare and Co., 37, rue de
la Bucherie on the Left Bank of Seine.
There is no other bookshop like this anywhere
else in the world and no bookseller like its founder-owner George Whitman, 98 years. Shakespeare and
Co. can rightfully claim to be the most talked and
written about and most photographed bookshop in
the world and George Whitman the most widely
known bookseller in the whole world. Shakespeare
and Co. and Whitman had already acquired a legendary status when I was
just beginning to explore
old books at Delhi’s
Sunday Bazar, Calcutta’s
College Street and Madras’
Moor Market. The first
time I ever heard of the
quaint bookshop and its
maverick owner was from
some the hippy passing by
Delhi on way to Banaras
in the late 1960s.
The bookshop, founded
in 1951, though not at its
present site, can actually
claim to be much older,
for the name Shakespeare
and Co. was taken by Whitman from a bookshop and lending library of
that name founded by another American of an earlier generation named Sylvia Beach whom Whitman
has always admired. Bleach’s bookshop was well known in literary Paris of her times. Famous French
authors like Andre Gide Paul Valery and Jules
Romain and American émigrés like Ernest
Hemingway were regulars at her shop as were
Lawrence Ferlinghetti, William Burroughs,
Allen Ginsberg and many others at Whitman’s in
later years.
I first stood at the door of Shakespeare and Co.
sometime in the summer of 1980 while in Paris for a
few days on way to Algiers. But that time I did not
have the guts to enter the shop because I had little
money in my pocket—just 15 British pounds that I
needed to save till the last of my 15-day trip through
three countries. I felt terribly disappointed then. But
I was back at the shop a few years later with enough
money to buy two books directly from the hands of
the legendary Whitman. But I didn't know much
about Whitman then. I only knew that his was a
bookshop where any visitor who could convince him
of his literary credentials could sleep there for free
and have a pancake, a coffee and some broth on top
of that. All that one was required to do was a few
hours work at the shop—work like dusting and
shelving the books, mopping the floor, and moving
the cartons of books about the shop. About 50,000
young and old men and women from many
countries round the world have lived in the shop
since it was opened at the present address some
50 years ago.
George was born in a scholarly middle class
American family in 1912, went to college there, left
home at a young age, travelled round the country
and part of Latin America like a hobo, read Karl
Marx, became a communist during the high phase
of McCarthyism, abandoned America, went to Paris,
set up shop there, fell in love with a woman, fathered
a girl child and has lived happily thereafter holding
high the communist credo: “Take what you need;
give what you can.” That is the credo of Shakespeare
and Co. too
Whitman has lived a frugal life, almost the life of
a hobo that he once was. He has collected no material trappings about him other than the books in the
shop that now cover every nook and corner of the
three-floor building. Those who want to sleep there
in the night – and there are always many of them –
can sleep wherever they can find a bench, an easy
chair or even on the floor in the middle of the bookshelves. Mornings they must go out and find a toilet
in some restaurant or at a shelter for the poor.
George is now old and the bookshop is run by his
once enstranged daughter Sylvia Whitman. I have
not been to the shop since she took over a few years
ago but I think I’ll visit her this summer.
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