George Whitman, proprietor of the Shakespeare and Company bookshop, Paris, in 2009. Either way I hope finally to have a niche where I can safely look upon the world’s horrors and beauty.” I now own one of the best private libraries in the Latin Quarter and, living as I do on less than a dollar a day, I have accumulated a small capital … I’ve talked with Sylvia Beach … There is a possibility that she would consent to go into business with me – although I’ve been avoiding offers of partnership, it would be an honour and a privilege to work with Sylvia Beach, should she decide to reopen Shakespeare and Company. But one of his regular visitors, the young Lawrence Ferlinghetti (later owner of the City Lights bookstore in San Francisco), upset his plans by telling him he had to get out of his book-cluttered hole and run a proper shop.Ī year later Whitman wrote: “I live for the day when I’ll have a bookstore to embellish this workaday world. Three years later, he was convinced that with his limited capital and specialist knowledge, his goal should be a significant lending library with a free reading room. In this way he acquired a good enough book collection to set up a lending library in his hotel room. Arriving in Paris, in the autumn of 1946, he enrolled at the Sorbonne and began swapping his GI food vouchers for other veterans’ book allowances. Having gained a degree in journalism from Boston University, this bookish vagabond hitchhiked and train-hopped across Mexico, Central America and the United States, then served in the American army during the second world war, ending up in Taunton, Massachusetts, where, briefly, he ran a small bookshop. He may or may not have been related to his namesake, but he was certainly a great admirer of Walt. But Beach lived on, and after the war ended, the GI Bill brought Americans to Paris. The Anglo-American bookshop in the rue de l’Odéon, which had been the rendezvous for famous writers and where early purchasers of Ulysses, published by Beach, sometimes found themselves being served by its author, was no more. Books, photographs and furniture had all been carried to an upstairs apartment and a house painter had obliterated the shop’s title. Two weeks later he returned to inform her that all her goods were about to be confiscated and within a couple of hours every shelf had been emptied. The shop’s creator and owner Sylvia Beach had refused to sell it to him, claiming she had only one copy and it was her own. Two weeks earlier, a German officer had walked in and tried to buy Finnegans Wake.
T he over-painting of a fascia board bearing the name Shakespeare and Company, in Paris in 1941, remains a significant moment in the history of bookshops.
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