Worldview: Shakespeare and Company Bookshop -- Parisian mecca of bookshops survives in era of Amazon

Parisian mecca of bookshops survives in era of Amazon
Worldview

Over the past decade I’ve watched the iconic cultural places in our city disappear one by one. Places like Maxwell Street and Halsted, the birthplace of Chicago jazz and blues and a hangout for writers like Nelson Algren, destroyed and rebuilt with a glossy soulless exterior.

I just assumed it was the same story everywhere. That’s when I found out Shakespeare & Company Bookshop was still open for business. I’d first heard about the shop when I began reading Earnest Hemingway’s work. When I got into Kerouac, there it was again. Many of the Beats hung out there and slept amongst the bookshelves.

These were the two generations more than any other in American literature that made me want to be a writer, so I decided to drop in during my trip to Paris this past summer.

Shakespeare & Company sits in a small stone courtyard just across the Seine from the Notre Dame Cathedral.

A sign scribbled in chalk near the entrance reads, "Some People call me the Don Quixote of the French Quarter because my head is so far up in the clouds that I can imagine all of us Angels in Paradise."

It finishes with the line, “I have been doing this for fifty years, now it is my daughter’s turn.”

The message is dated January 2004. That’s when George Whitman handed over his beloved bookshop to his then-24-year-old daughter Sylvia. His daughter is named after the shop’s original owner, an American expatriate named Sylvia Beach who first opened Shakespeare & Company’s doors in the early 20th century.

Upon entering the bookshop, I didn’t have to look far to find Sylvia Whitman, perched at her desk just inside the shop’s left-side entrance where the antique books are sold. Sylvia is a fair-skinned, bright-eyed, 29-year-old businesswoman. She grew up in the apartment above the shop, where authors like Lawrence Durrrell regularly visited.

“Running around without shoes on, hiding in corners and being read stories upon stories upon stories. It was a fairy tale childhood,” Whitman said.

While many independent bookstores have closed their doors because of declining sales, Sylvia has maintained Shakespeare & Company’s loyal customer base and its legacy.

“I’ve tried to keep the atmosphere and the philosophy that Dad created, so we still have writers sleeping in the bookshop,” she said.

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Crimethinc: Building a New Kind of Infoshop

Building A New Kind Of Infoshop
by Peter P.
Crimethinc

On Saturday, November 13, a new and experimental infoshop in Winona, MN, opened it’s doors to the public. The Burrow is one of the first new infoshops to open since the controversial essay “5 Steps to Reviving Your Failing Anarchist Bookstore“, and at a time when long-standing infoshops are throwing in their towels, this account offers insight into the new models still unseen.

This story begins where our coverage of small-town organizing left off in Rolling Thunder #7. What follows is not only an account and recipe for a new type of space, but a possible intermediate step in anarchist organizing in long-term communities.

If You Build It . . .

Early on, the plan was to put a space in our home. Our friends and colleagues have known about our wild dreams for the last two years — that we’d be able to have a social space independent from the rest of our house. Now that we’ve finished most of the work, a community is waiting for us.

We knew from the start that making good on our promise would mean a lot of work and time. It would mean learning how to do things we’d never done before. Perhaps most importantly, it would mean we would have to care enough about the outcome to do things well.

The process was long, though. Visitors passed through to see the space in wholly different stages and shades. Before any work was done the wallpaper was sagging, the plaster dripping, like some paper street soap company.

The walls were first to go. We had to tear down the old walls, swinging hammers and crowbars. Carpenters call this doing “demo” and it is similar, in many ways, to the anarchist sense of the word. Of course, it wasn’t all smash. We shoveled plaster and lath. We scooped armloads of asbestos vermiculite. It was dusty, disgusting, probably deadly, and it had to be done.

To Read the Rest of the Essay and to See Pictures of the Journey/Process