Two visionaries, a woman, Sylvia Beach and a man George Whitman in love for books, culture, writers and readers: a place, Paris.
A bookstore that it is a legend: Shakespeare and Company.
These ones the ingredients of the Two visionaries, a woman, Sylvia Beach and a man George Whitman in love for books, culture, writers and readers: a place, Paris.
A bookstore that it is a legend: Shakespeare and Company.
These ones the ingredients of the first stunning book published by Shakespeare and Company Publishing House in 2016: Shakespeare and Company A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart Edited by Krista Halverson another lady who fell in love for the unique atmosphere breathed in the bookstore.
We all know a lot about the first Shakespare and Company opened by Sylvia Beach: an aggregation of splendid American writers in love for Paris because more permissive and because of its romantic atmosphere.
Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein and her companion, Ezra Pound, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, his Ulysses, Dubliners, Finnegans Wake, the help, veneration and devotion of Sylvia Beach for Joyce and her fight for seeing published his books.
Less was known in terms of books about George Whitman, the second owner of Shakespeare and Company and this book wants to give voice at "the second" Shakespeare and Company, a store this one who happily and powerfully is like a magnet for the most diversified reasons: it's a magical place where that utopia of sharing all together a way a life free from money, free from the common conventions but pervaded by culture took place.
George Whitman a communist in Paris, had a motto: "Give what you can, take what you need" and in doing so, he shared books, beds, meals, culture, work with people all around the world of all ages in his bookshop.
The strongest motto of Shakespare and Company is: Be not Inhospitable to strangers, Lest they Be Angels in Disguise. Although it's from the Bible Whitman has always thought that good books are bibles because they teaches us the essence of life.
George Whitman was born in Salem Massachussets, yes the city where a lot of women where hanged up thinking that they were witches in 1600.
He studied in Boston and then he decided that he wanted to discover the world in an adventurous trip that would have brought him in several part of the world.
Mexico, Panama, the same USA, Greenland because of war.
His words of Los Angeles are severe: "...Idiotic voices, lips that never laughs, hearts that never hope...The land of the almighty dollar where banks are filled with gold, skies are filled with smoke, and men are choked with despair."
The idea of the corner of the world where George wanted to settle down was different. He wrote while in Kansas City: "I long to bury myself in a really exciting city, a city where culture is vibrant, a city where music is passionately loved, and where love is something holy and beautiful - a city like Paris or Moscow - where poetry is part of life, where men are poets and life is a poem."
This man was enchanting, you will agree with me.
Whitman opened a first bookstore at Taunton on the model of the french ones for later deciding to afford to Paris, where with a certain velocity started to accumulate a great quantity of books lending them. It happened in his same room, the place where he lived him, and the legend wants that once returned to his room he found two young people who, while they were waiting for his arrival were reading. The intuition of what Shakespeare and Company would have become started from that episode.
Whitman has always been social; he loved to surround himself of other angels in disguise.
When in Paris he enters in contact with legendary Sylvia Beach deciding that it was the moment of opening his own bookshop on August 14 1951 at 37 rue la Bucherie.
Per decades this bookstore lived under a sober guidance, without a proper bathroom, without electricity, without any kind of commodities.
Substantially people who lived in Shakespeare and Company didn't search for a comfy, or luxurious place where to stay in but for a literary adventure, the best one of their life.
Shakespeare and Company is located in a corner of Paris where exists the oldest Paris's church and the oldest Paris's tree; it is close to Notre Dame, although as also asserted by someone else in this boook, to me Shakespeare and Company would be my church.
Not only: George opened Shakespeare and Company in a vibrant place.
Close to the store there is a neighborood not exactly rich, but populated by students, alternative people, writers, and creatives of every sorta.
In this fertile humus, with a guy like George Whitman, pretty revolutionary also regarding the way of living existing in our world, Shakespeare and Company started to speak at the newest generations of new fights, new battles, giving a special and personal imprint at the current society and at the different social problems experienced in the world.
At first the name of this bookshop was not Shakespeare and Company but Librairie Le Mistral.
Tumbleweeds, people with which George shared his existence, people from all over the world are named in this way because of a dry plant located in the American plains.
Most of them were and are students, people in search of a place where sleeping; at the same time they are in love for culture.
George asked in return at these young people for a free bed and free meals of writing an auto-biography, reading a book per day and helping in the bookshop.
On 1952 a group of bohemians founded Merlin a magazine where a still unknown Samuel Beckett was published with Jean-Paul Sartre. This still little bookshop in the while knows improvements because George bought various other parts for implementing and keeping always more magnificients his shop; the fixation of George for the expansion of his shop will continue forever.
Famous writers frequented the bookshop: from Anais Nin, to James Baldwin, from Ferlinghetti, a personal friend and founder of City Lights, a beautiful bookshop located in San Francisco, to Lawrence Durrell;
and then Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, the Beats, Henry Miller.
Anais Nin writes that Whitman didn't understand when writers personally invited did not stay there with him, by a fireplace often without wood to burn, in a room without a door. Anais adds: "He forgot that these writers from old Paris now had wives, children, mistresses, homes in America, fame and hotel reservations."
Problems appeared for Shakespeare and Company during the 1960s when George was forced to close the store. More: he could continue to offer hospitality to everyone but not without a proper registration. No sure the reason for these measures, but surely there were thinking brains there and someone who knows? scared by it. There was also whisper of a CIA's involvement.
George didn't lose hope: he called in this phase Shakespeare and Company the Free University of Paris while Ginsberg speaking at the Herald Tribune of this situations: "George is a saint, lives on nothing, gives shelter to everybody. Help young poets, too, but he's very poor....His only income came from books."
Books that George honestly wouldn't never wanted to sell, but lending.
As said once George: "We are slowly reconstructing the ancient monastery that existed here centuries ago, but in the form of a wonderland of books, friends, writers, comrades, such as has never before existed on land or sea, a socialist utopia masquering as a bookstore."
Frank Sinatra suggested at someone of reading some books for then afford to Paris searching for Shakespeare and Company and George: "I know that man" he told.
Some of these young people became important names as it happened for Sebastian Barry, Ian Rankin and Ethan Hawke. Dave Eggers in his 20s told: "Shakespeare and Company? An absurb place - almost down to the last crooked corner and narrow staircase. The bookstore of my dreams."
On July 18 1990 a fire devastated the first floor and front room of Shakespeare and Company. No one of the staff, or people inside were injured, but devastations in terms of books lost in the fire was immense, including the damages caused by fire.
A strained Whitman went to bed, devastated by what he saw and too stressed for thinking.
Once the news spread in all the corners of the world everyone wanted to help George and his venerated, beloved bookshop. From Boston to New York, from London to San Francisco, including Paris, everyone tried their best donating money for the cause: restoring Shakespeare and Company. There were private donations as well and writers organized lectures for helping George Whitman.
Shakespeare and Company was restored more beauty than before.
If this problem was resolved another one worried George: the destiny of the bookshop once dead.
At first it sounded that Ferlinghetti could be of some help but later they didn't conclude because Shakespeare and Company was still a shop pretty romantic without any touch of modernity and City Lights searched for something different.
The only solution Sylvia, the daughter that George had had when at 70 years married a 20s girl.
Sylvia wasn't too much affectionate to George or the shop because she lived in London, she had her own life and she didn't hear from that eccentric grumpy dad from a long time.
This reunion meant to George Whitman pure joy and later...Discussions also for the modernity touches Sylvia decided to give at the store.
Electricity, a real bathroom, a telephone, a credit card machine and a cash registry. This part of the story is too hilarious! George considered the cash registry a powerful enemy...
One day Bill Clinton visited the shop and would have wanted to meet the owner. George was to bed and he didn't want to see anyone, also if that one was the President of the USA. Later they convinced him in a way or in another.
Sylvia Beach Whitman continues the activity of his dad passed away at the age of 98 years; the shop is very modern, you find it in every social media, it's a real shop without to lose the romantic touch donated by George.
Not only: tumbleweeds continue to be accepted, and every week on the ground floor there are events with the most important writers of the moment: Zadie Smith, Don DeLillo, David Simon...George's back bedroom is now a writer's guest room.
But what it is important is this concept of cordiality and hospitality. If a person doesn't have money but wants to read, he/she can does it, all the time he/she wants because of the rich library that Shakespeare and Company has.
When he was 24 George wrote this: "As the circle of knowledge widens, life grows more beautiful and heroic. We are a part of everything - men, women, books. cities, railroads -all made from the same atoms and melecules, all living together and dying together, joined into one imperishable unity that can never be divided."
When once he talked with his daughter, she said her: "I hope you'll be happy here," because George has been and lived an amazing, beautiful, populated life. Shakespeare and Company was his life; books were his life, and culture kept him alive.
One day he said "I am tired of people saying they don't have time to read. I don't have time for anything else!" proud of promoting literature and sharing this passion with everyone.
Books, the one we read form our identity; who we are. George thought this and it is true. Absolutely.
George Whitman realized his dream of an utopic world where there were no rules, but books, culture and freedom. Absolutely. He spent the life he wanted to spend, sharing what he learned on the road with the people who touched his existence and completely free from the common conventions of this world.
This book is extraordinary. You will find written pages of Tumbleweeds but also editors, writers, and many other people who met and interacted with George; there are cartoons, there are illustrations, pictures, images; it's more a visual than a common book, for let us think, for let us remember a revolutionary, pacific man who believed in others, who believed in a different world and open his doors, his culture, his books, his thoughts with everyone he met along his existence.
Anna Maria Polidori
