George Whitman and his Shakespeare and Co. in Paris

今天早上聽BBC新聞，George Whitman 於昨日在他自己家，位於巴黎的由他在1951年創立的 Shakespeare and Company書店樓上病逝，享年98歲，剛過生日兩天。我每次去巴黎都會去這家書店逛逛。它很小，在拉丁區，塞納河左岸，離巴黎聖母院咫尺之遙，隔河相望。它是一家經營英文書的書店。裏麵新書有，更多的是舊書，從地板上一直堆到天花板。它的樓上有13張床，供窮學生住。現在還有學生在那兒免費打工，換取在那兒過夜。但它沒有浴室，第二天得到公共廁所用水。我喜歡它的hommy感覺和書的味道，可以在裏麵坐一下午。伍迪艾倫的新電影“Midnight in Paris”中有它的場景。

貼幾張網上搜來的照片。我自己也拍過，現在手頭上沒有。





George Whitman 生平 - from Washington Post December 14, 2011. Whitman was born on Dec. 12, 1913, in East Orange, New Jersey, although he grew up in Massachusetts. His twin loves of the written word and foreign travel were nurtured early on, when his father, a physics professor who authored several science books, took the family along for a yearlong sabbatical at a Chinese university in 1925. That was the first of a series of adventures that later saw Whitman wander Latin America, sail to Hawaii and hitch his way across the United States. After graduating from Boston University with a degree in journalism in 1935, Whitman enlisted in the U.S. Army. During World War II, he was trained as a Medical Warrant Officer and treated the wounded at hospitals across Europe, according to the store’s statement. Whitman moved to Paris permanently under the GI Bill in 1948. Three years later, he founded his bookshop in a rickety old building directly across the Seine River from Notre Dame cathedral. Initially baptized “Le Mistral” after the blustering winds that blow in off the Mediterranean, the shop’s name was later changed. The original Shakespeare and Company bookstore came from legendary literary matron Sylvia Beach, and the place was a magnet for English-speaking expats like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. She opened that store in the early 1920s in a Left Bank district not far from its current home, on the rue de l’Odeon. The shop gained fame by publishing Irish writer James Joyce’s banned book “Ulysses.” World War II forced it to close, and Whitman gave Shakespeare and Company a new life in new digs in 1951. Over the decades, Whitman’s refuge for literary souls from far and wide became a Paris institution. It’s widely regarded as an honor for authors to give a reading at the store, where eager listeners jostle for a spot among the stacks of first, second- and thirdhand books lining the walls and floors. Whitman was made an officer of arts and letters by the French Culture Ministry in 2006. He is to be buried in the city’s venerable Pere Lachaise cemetery, where the remains of literary giants including Oscar Wilde, Balzac and French poet Guillaume Apollinaire rest