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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