sinopsis

This first-ever history of the legendary bohemian bookstore in Paris interweaves essays and poetry from dozens of writers associated with the shop—A. Ginsberg, A. Nin, R. Stone and J. Winterson, among others—with hundreds of never-before-seen archival pieces, including photographs of J. Baldwin, W. Burroughs and Langston Hughes, plus a foreword by the celebrated British novelist Jeanette Winterson and an epilogue by S. Whitman, the daughter of the store’s founder, G. Whitman. The book has been edited by K. Halverson, director of the newly founded Shakespeare and Co. publishing house. G. Whitman opened his bookstore in a tumbledown 16th-century building just across the Seine from Notre Dame in 1951, a decade after the original Shakespeare and Company had closed. Run by S. Beach, it had been the meeting place for the Lost Generation and the first publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses. (This book includes an illustrated adaptation of Beach’s memoir.) Since Whitman picked up the mantle, Shakespeare and Co. has served as a home-away-from-home for many celebrated writers, from J. L. Borges to R. Bradbury, A.M. Homes to Dave Eggers, as well as for young authors and poets. Visitors are invited not only to read the books in the library and to share a pot of tea, but sometimes also to live in the bookstore itself—all for free. More than 30,000 people have stayed at Shakespeare and Co. fulfilling Whitman’s vision of a “socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore.”