Angels in Disguise: Shakespeare And Co.

Essay and Photos by Thomas E. Kennedy

Enough has been written about the wonderful Latin-Quarter antiquarian bookshop, Shakespeare And Co., on the left bank of the Seine in Paris, that I feel free to make this brief. But I must say a few words about this “wonderland of books,” as Henry Miller called it, and share some of my photographs of it.
The original Shakespeare And Co was run by Sylvia Beach from 1919 to 1941 at 12 rue de l'Odeon. There it was that James Joyce's Ulysses was first published, a shop frequented by Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound, Ford Maddox Ford, Gertrude Stein, Joyce and others.

Around 1950, an American expatriate in Paris named George Whitman – son of Walt (not Walt the Brooklyn poet, but Walt the Massachusetts text-book author) – purchased with the help of a small inheritance a site that had housed an Arab grocer at 37 rue de la Bûcherie in the fifth

George Whitman at work in his shop, Easter 2000

arrondisement, across the Seine from Notre Dame, and opened a bookstore there that he called Le Mistral – after the wind that blows across the Mediterranean from Africa to the south coast of France. Among his clientele and friends were Henry Miller, Graham Greene, Anais Nin, Langston Hughes, James Jones, James Baldwin, William Styron, Richard Wright, Ginsburg, Corso, Ferlinghetti, and many others, including Sylvia Beach. In 1964, after Sylvia Beach had died, Whitman renamed his shop Shakespeare And Co in her honor. Since then, he also named his daughter after her — Sylvia Beach Whitman.
There the shop has been for well over half a century now, weathering legal assaults by the French authorities, book-destroying fires and tiresome lease squabbles, still standing after all those years, as of this writing still run by George and his daughter Sylvia. Ironically, the French authorities who over the years ago had hassled George for not having the papers required of foreign merchants in France have recently awarded him one of France's highest honors — Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et Lettres, a badge on a ribbon with a rosette worn on the left side of the chest.
I discovered this great place only fifteen years ago, in the early 1990s. I had recently published my first novel, Crossing Borders, which was as unknown as I. Scheduled to read from it that evening at a now alas defunct literary center called The Foundry, founded by David Applefield and John Calder, I took a walk through the fifth and visited Shakespeare And Co. As I stepped through the door, I saw George Whitman himself seated behind the cash register, reading. I recognized him from photos.
“Excuse me, Mr. Whitman,” I began, “my name is Tom Kennedy and…”
He rose. He took my hand. He said, “Tom Kennedy! From Copenhagen! Your bed is all ready for you upstairs. And you must be our guest of honor at our literary tea on Sunday.”
How he knew my name or where I came from is a mystery I never solved – perhaps he simply knew every single detail of what was happening in Paris that might be of even the most remote interest to literary-minded people.
Since then I visit the Whitman wonderland whenever I am in Paris, usually several times per visit. I love to browse and hang around, eavesdropping on the conversations around the cash register area – a kind of conversation pit – and up in the second floor reading room, which is equipped not only with books but with lounging beds and a little typewriter niche for the inspired. Mostly young people gather there, and the conversation and faces are rich with the hope and enthusiasm and ideas that continue to make Paris the world capital of literary expatriatism, lost generation after beat generation after hippie generation after whatever generation we may have reached now.
Last year on a visit, I had the good fortune of meeting George, now in his 95th year, and his lovely young daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman, in her early twenties,

George Whitman and Sylvia Beach Whitman, above the shop, February 2005

and they invited me up to the private rooms above the shop. There they sat, surrounded by books, smiling like a couple of generations of angel, clearly devoted to one another and to books and to the shop and its motto: Be Not Inhospitable to Strangers Lest They Be Angels in Disguise.

Upstairs: Shakespeare And Co Motto:
Be Not Inhospitable to Strangers
Lest They Be Angels in Disguise

The back shelves: sketch of George Whitman
(“My country is the world, my religion is humanity”)
above Public Enemies Poster
of two contemporary western heads of state

Upstairs: A visitor lounges in the reading room