The Sunday Herald does a nice profile on Paris's famed bookstore Shakespeare & Company. I was there just last month. What a thrill! I sat in front of it, writing in my journal, the Seine flowing across the way, the Notre Dame standing against a sheet of blue sky. It felt good to be there, right to be there as a writer myself, knowing the history of Shakespeare & Co and those famous writers who haunted the doorway.
I only spent a few days in Paris but I found myself amongst the Shakespeare & Company stacks a few times, like a moth, as the cliche goes, to flame. Upstairs there's a little writing nook (complete with old typewriter) and beyond that a sitting room. Late one night I sat up there, again, writing in my journal. It was tremendously quiet up there and I could look out the window and see the buildings opposite the river alit in the dusk and I just kept writing and writing and writing. No one bothered me. No one even came up stairs. I checked my watch a couple of times. Should I be up here?! When does the store close? Would they lock me in?
I left really late at night, wandered up the streets past the Parthenon to my little hovel of a hotel. It was near perfect.
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