By James Aitchison

Dappled sunlight spills into the little Paris courtyard.  Across the Seine, Notre-Dame rises above the rooftops.  Nothing is hurried.  Occasionally a cover is opened, a page is turned.  We are on the Left Bank, and time has stood still.  We have come to pay homage to one of the world’s great literary institutions — Shakespeare & Company — at 37 rue de la Bucherie.  This is Kilometre Zero, where all French roads begin.  More significantly, this is where the world’s greatest literary journeys begin, in one tiny, impossibly cluttered bookshop, where shelves and stairways are crammed with books, books and more books, a cradle of words and a celebration of ideas — and where writers can even sleep the night!

Once a monastery, La Maison du Mustier, where a monk set out to light the lamps at nightfall, now the lamps of literature illuminate its windows.

Sylvia Beach, daughter of an American clergyman, opened the first Shakespeare & Company in 1919.  It was half bookstore, half lending library, located at 12 rue de l’Odeon.  In those heady days after the First World War, Paris became the epicentre of literature.  The great writers of the time — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Eliot and Pound — frequented Sylvia’s shop.  A new wave of female voices was equally attracted: Gertrude Stein, Janet Flanner and Mina Loy.

Beach’s shop served as the writers’ home away from home, and occasionally a loan service.  Hemingway wrote about his friend: “Sylvia had a lively, sharply sculptured face, brown eyes that were as alive as a small animal’s and as gay as a small girl’s.  She was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip.  No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.”

And no one was ever nicer to James Joyce.

In July 1920, Beach met the Irish writer at a dinner party.  Joyce had been trying unsuccessfully to publish his manuscript for Ulysses.  Despite its daring nature, or because of it, Beach offered to publish the book.  She hired Maurice Darantière, a printer from Dijon who did not understand English, to oversee the printing.  Shakespeare & Company gained considerable fame after it published Ulysses in 1922.  Ten years later, Joyce sold the publishing rights to the powerful Random House for a $45,000 advance.  He did not tell Beach of this decision, nor did he offer her a share of his windfall.  When challenged about his mean-spirited attitude, Joyce scoffed: “A baby belongs to its mother, not to the midwife, doesn’t it?”  Meanwhile, Beach was left near bankruptcy from the debt she had incurred to publish Ulysses.

The final blow came when the Nazis occupied Paris.  A German officer entered Sylvia’s shop and demanded her last copy of Finnegan’s Wake.  She refused.  Told he would return that day and confiscate all her books, Sylvia moved her stocks to an upstairs apartment for safekeeping.  She would spend six months in an internment camp and her bookshop never reopened.  She died in Paris in 1962.

……..

George Whitman, another American, opened the second Shakespeare & Company.  Whitman, a self-proclaimed “tumbleweed”, was described as “blowing from place to place, sheltered by the grace of strangers”.

During the Great Depression he chose to embark on a “hobo adventure”, with only $40 to his name.  His journeys brought him the length of America, Mexico and Central America.  Arriving in Paris, he decided to open a bookstore at Shakespeare & Company’s present location.  (At the time it was a former Algerian grocery.)  He named it Le Mistral, but changed the name in April 1964 — on the four hundredth anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth  — and in admiration of his friend Sylvia Beach who frequently visited his shop.  (Later, Whitman named his daughter in Sylvia’s Beach honour.)

Whitman’s founding philosophy: “I created this bookstore like a man would write a novel, building each room like a chapter, and I like people to open the door the way they open a book, a book that leads into a magic world in their imaginations.” 

Soon, Whitman’s shop was a magnet for the greatest literary talents of the era: Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell, James Jones and James Baldwin.

Experiencing acts of generosity on his travels proved inspirational for Whitman.  He penned the sign above his bookshop’s library: “Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise”.  He threw open the doors for other “tumbleweeds” to come and sleep in his shop, among the books, on small beds that doubled as benches during the day.  It is estimated that 30,000 young writers and artists have stayed in the shop.  Alan Sillitoe, Robert Stone, Kate Grenville, Sebastian Barry, Ethan Hawke, Geoffrey Rush and David Rakoff number among those denizens who shared Whitman’s literary commune.

In 2006, George’s daughter Sylvia officially took over the company and is guiding its fortunes into publishing, hosting literary salons, and enhancing the traditions of a bookselling legend.