Down and out in Paris

For half a century, a crowded bookshop on the Left Bank has offered food and a bed to penniless authors - the only rule is that they read a book a day. Jeanette Winterson revisits Shakespeare and Company
Browsers at Shakespeare and Company, Paris.
Not on the pay-n-go Anglo-Saxon business model: browsers at Shakespeare and Company, Paris. Photograph: Eamonn McCabe

I first met George Whitman in 2007 when he hit me over the head with a book. I was in Paris, standing on the pavement outside the English-language bookshop Shakespeare and Company, talking to George's daughter Sylvia, when a copy of Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London whizzed down from the third floor of the building. Direct hit - but intended for Sylvia, not me.

"What does a man have to do to get some attention around here?" I looked up, and there was George, 93, leaning out of the window in his pyjamas, taking aim with another volume.

"Dostoevsky! The Idiot! Ha ha!"

Sylvia took my arm and checked my head. "Do you want to come up and meet Dad?"

We pushed our way through the crowded shop, Sylvia stopping every two seconds to answer a question or help a customer. The books are piled over two floors - the ground floor deep and open, stacked with new and in-print titles, the upper floor a warren of second-hand volumes, anything from Gibbon to Hemingway. There's a library space for sitting and reading because this shop isn't a pay-n-go Anglo-Saxon business model, it's a place for the browser and the flâneur. You pass the time here, in the company of books.

Perched above all this, like an old eagle, is George Whitman. He used to sleep on a mattress in among the books, but along the way he managed to buy the apartment upstairs, and now he lives his book-lined life with a bed, a sink, a bath, a table and an ancient stove, the stewpot steaming up the windows and fogging the view across to Notre Dame. George likes cooking for his family - he has only one daughter, but a big, boisterous, ever-changing family, and that's the way it's been since 1951, when the demobbed GI, who had chosen Paris as his home, decided to open a bookstore.

"After the war, I was living in a hotel on the Seine, very cheap in those days, and the landlord wanted to get us out so he could make more money - he bust all the locks on the doors. But I figured this was a good thing, as now anyone could come and go, in and out of my room, and borrow books. I always had a pile of books. I'd come back from my errands and my room would be full of people I didn't know, reading my books."

George's first bookshop was on a barge, but the books got damp. Then, with an inheritance of $500, he was able to buy the boarded-up grocery store that became the first part of the jigsaw of buildings that is now Shakespeare and Company.

For 10 years the shop was called Le Mistral. George has always loved the idea of people blowing in from around the world; people, ideas, energy, excitement. George believes in lending and borrowing books, not just selling them. He held out his hand to me. "Why don't you stay in the writers' room and write another book? You know how we do things here?"

I began to find out.

Way back, in 1913, the original Shakespeare and Company was opened by a young American called Sylvia Beach. Her shop in rue de l'Odéon soon became the place for all the English-speaking writers in Paris. Her lover, Adrienne Monnier, owned the French bookstore across the road, and she and Beach ran back and forth, finding penniless writers a place to stay, lending them books, arranging loans, taking their mail, sending their work to small magazines and, most spectacularly, publishing James Joyce's Ulysses in 1922 when no one else would touch it.

Hemingway was a regular at the shop, and writes about it in his memoir A Moveable Feast. His spare, emotional prose makes a poignant story of those early days, when material things weren't so important, and if you could get time to read and write, and live on cheap oysters and coarse bread and sleep by a stove somewhere, then you were happy.

It was Hemingway, as a major in the US army, who at the liberation of Paris in 1945 drove his tank straight to the shuttered Shakespeare and Company and personally liberated Sylvia Beach. "No one that I ever knew was nicer to me," he said later, rich, famous and with a Nobel prize.

But after the war, Beach was older and tired. She didn't reopen the shop that had been forced into closure by the occupation. It was George Whitman who took over the spirit of what she had made, but not the name - until 1962, when Beach attended a reading by Lawrence Durrell at the bookstore and they all agreed that it should be renamed Shakespeare and Company.

George took in the beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. Henry Miller ate from the stewpot, but was too grand to sleep in the tiny writers' room. Anaïs Nin left her will under George's bed. There are signed photos from Rudolf Nureyev and Jackie Kennedy, signed copies of Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs.

George opened his doors midday to midnight, and the deal then is the deal now: sleep in the shop, on tiny beds hidden among the bookstacks; work for two hours a day helping out with the running of the place; and, crucially, read a book a day, whatever you like, but all the way through, unless maybe it's War and Peace, in which case you can take two days.

George still reads a book a day, and gets very cross if he hears that anyone is wasting his time. You can be bawled out of Shakespeare and Company just as suddenly as you are invited in. The spirit of the place has to be honoured, and there are no exceptions.

At any time there are six or more young people from the compass points of the world, reading, talking, thinking, boiling spaghetti in the kettle, running across the road to the public showers, stacking, carrying, selling, stock-taking, and all in a spirit of energy and enterprise that is not to be found in any chain bookstores. They stay for two weeks or two months, and some just sleep outside on a bench until there's room inside.

If you are a published writer, then you might be able to stay in the tiny pod of the writers' room, and huddle against an ancient plug-in radiator and not worry too much if the electricity goes down and you have to abandon your laptop for a notepad. "There was no running water, no electricity when we started," George says. "It didn't matter. That stuff doesn't matter. Books, people, ideas, that's what matters."

Thousands of people have come through his doors, slept in his shop, eaten at his table, and many of them still write to him, or return. There's nothing quaint or historicalised about Shakespeare and Company. The values, the ethos and hospitality don't change, but the shop goes forward with the times. In 2006, aged 92, George retired, and his daughter, named after the original Sylvia, took over. She was 25 - the age difference tells you a lot about George, his appetites and his energies.

Sylvia lived in the shop until she was seven; then, after her parents' divorce, she went with her mother to be educated in England. It wasn't her intention to take over the shop, but she was drawn back in, and she has made it her life.

"When I first arrived, we didn't even have a phone and Penguin was threatening to cut us off for not paying their bills, so I had to run round St Michel looking for a pay phone and ring Accounts in Essex." She adores her father, and is committed to carrying on his legacy - but in her own way. "Dad was furious when I took out one of the beds and installed a computer. When I told him we were going to start a literary festival and a publishing business, he said: 'Who's gonna cook for all those extra people?'"

The literary festival now runs biennially and the publishing company will begin later this year. Sylvia is buying another bit of the jigsaw too, so that the shop can open a café next door. It will mean borrowing money, and looking for new investors, but she is unsentimental about what it will take to stay in business. "At present, small bookshops in France can thrive because the chains aren't allowed to undercut the cover price of any title by more than 5%. But Sarkozy doesn't like that, and if he changes the rules, we'll be in the same position as all those independent stores in England. So we need to diversify now."

It will be depressing if the Mad Hatter "wisdom" of the "free" market manages to do in France what it has done in the UK - that is, close two-thirds of independent bookshops. Anyone can buy cheaply online if they wish, but consumer evidence in France is that people prefer small stores and patronise them enough to keep them open. If the market is allowed to distort this preference, no one wins but the anonymous bully-on-the-block bookstores with their bored assistants and bestsellers. Writers suffer terribly because big bookshops don't backlist any more. Browsing a writer's backlist is a thing of the past, except in independent stores committed to the idea of books, rather than just selling books.

Every Monday night at Shakespeare and Company, there's a free reading by a published writer, while writers-in-progress, as George calls young hopefuls, can meet in the library to read their work. Patrick Keogh from Faber UK has got together with Sylvia to offer creative writing weekends at the bookshop, and these are heavily oversubscribed.

While there are plenty of readers who are not writers, there are no writers who are not readers, and one of the great gifts of this extraordinary bookshop is to keep writers and readers on the same creative continuum. Writers are not reduced to small-time semi-celebrities, and readers are not patronised as consumers. As Sylvia says, "We sell books for a living, but it's the books that are our life."

• The Faber Academy holds its next workshop, Starting Afresh, on 12-15 March at Shakespeare and Company. Details: faber.co.uk/academy Shakespeare and Company, 37 rue de la Bûcherie, Paris, is open 10am to 11pm, seven days a week. shakespeareandcompany.com

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