Paris bookshop
lets writers
sleep over
A few steps from Quasimodo’s bell tower is a heaven for booklovers. Shakespeare and Dostoevsky have been housemates here for more than half a century.
Some people call the owner of this bookshop (George Whitman) the Don Quixote of the Latin Quarter. He says he’s a hero from Dostoevsky’s novel.
“Dostoevsky wrote a book about me - “The Idiot” - and this is my favorite book”, he says.
The Shakespearean and Company to some people may seem like somebody’s home - as the books line the walls from floor to ceiling and there are even beds so that the writers can come and sleep over.
They are welcome to stay there in exchange of a few hours’ work.
“It’s a perfect place to write a book. You are surrounded by literature”, one of the writers says.
George, the owner of the shop, is now over 90, so his daughter runs the business. If George is Dostoevsky’s prince Mishkin, then Sylvia is Alice in Wonderland. She says: “I feel like I’m in a fairy story, I don’t know which exactly, but it could be Cinderella, because I do have to clean a lot, but I definitely feel that I’m in some kind of fairy tale and this is a palace of books and it has definitely a happy ending.”
Despite minor modernizations the shop is still an idiosyncratic place.
The resident “Prince Mishkin” may have retired, but he continues to wait for his heroine Nastasya Phillipovna to walk through the door. It’s becoming more like “Waiting for Godot” or waiting for the resurrection of men who, George says, wrote a story of his life half a century before he was born.
Some people call the owner of this bookshop (George Whitman) the Don Quixote of the Latin Quarter. He says he’s a hero from Dostoevsky’s novel.
“Dostoevsky wrote a book about me - “The Idiot” - and this is my favorite book”, he says.
The Shakespearean and Company to some people may seem like somebody’s home - as the books line the walls from floor to ceiling and there are even beds so that the writers can come and sleep over.
They are welcome to stay there in exchange of a few hours’ work.
“It’s a perfect place to write a book. You are surrounded by literature”, one of the writers says.
George, the owner of the shop, is now over 90, so his daughter runs the business. If George is Dostoevsky’s prince Mishkin, then Sylvia is Alice in Wonderland. She says: “I feel like I’m in a fairy story, I don’t know which exactly, but it could be Cinderella, because I do have to clean a lot, but I definitely feel that I’m in some kind of fairy tale and this is a palace of books and it has definitely a happy ending.”
Despite minor modernizations the shop is still an idiosyncratic place.
The resident “Prince Mishkin” may have retired, but he continues to wait for his heroine Nastasya Phillipovna to walk through the door. It’s becoming more like “Waiting for Godot” or waiting for the resurrection of men who, George says, wrote a story of his life half a century before he was born.
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