Shakespeare and Company: A Creative Sanctuary

It's been the place in Paris where the likes of James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway have hung out. It's the bookstore on the Left Bank, Shakespeare and Company. The Guardian revisits the fabled store and sees that it's still going strong.

From the piece...

Paperbacks line red wooden steps leading upstairs to what Sylvia calls the "non-commercial" floor: a library in which you could lose yourself, with one rule: books mustn't leave the premises. Here, as on the ground floor, single mattresses lurk between the shelves, and, in the children's section, a bunk bed. It's on these that young authors sleep each night.

"We have six at any one time," says Sylvia, "generally in their early 20s. They come to write from all over the world while doing a couple of hours in the shop a day. Generally they stay a week to a month, but one English poet stayed seven years." Seven years – really? "If someone's reading and writing, we encourage that," she says. "It's a different life after closing time. They all come out of the woodwork! And for us, it's an organic cycle: aspiring writers tapping away upstairs and books being sold downstairs."

Everything here encourages creativity. A tiny enclosed bureau, lined with rugs and a blue painted chair, bears the sign: "Feel free to use the typewriter for your lovely writing/creative ventures." Notes from customers are scrawled in all languages. "A friend told me if I ever felt lonely to come to Shakespeare & Company," one says. Visitors are so effusive that a few years ago George installed what he calls a "mirror of love", where hundreds more scribblings are pinned, from the surreal to the touching: "Dear Granny, I would like you to come to Paris with me", reads one. "Books insulate this nest of wandering dreams", reads another, "there should always be a place where stories reign over commercial enterprise."



And, speaking of the Left Bank, Parisians are bookish and cool. The city is buying up property and then leasing it out to independent booksellers.

From the story in The Globe & Mail:

Infused with that distinctive smell of fragile paper and old bindings, the store has been her life. But she always worried, she said, whether it would live on without her. In the past decade, five other independent booksellers within blocks of her shop have shut their doors, victims of rising rents and rapid gentrification.

The story is the same across the historic Latin Quarter, with its zigzag streets, medieval university buildings and, increasingly, big brand-name clothing stores. In 2000, according to a survey by the city of Paris, the district boasted 300 independent bookstores, many of them quirky specialty shops. Now, there are just 170.

In a city that thinks of itself as a capital of culture, the decline is seen as a full-fledged emergency.

To reverse the trend and revive the small bookseller tradition, Paris has taken on the role of landlord – but a landlord with a one-track mind. Through one of its redevelopment agencies, the city has been buying up property and commercial leases in the Latin Quarter and renting them to bookstores.