George Whitman and his Shakespeare and Co. in Paris

今天早上听BBC新闻，George Whitman 于昨日在他自己家，位于巴黎的由他在1951年创立的 Shakespeare and Company书店楼上病逝，享年98岁，刚过生日两天。我每次去巴黎都会去这家书店逛逛。它很小，在拉丁区，塞纳河左岸，离巴黎圣母院咫尺之遥，隔河相望。它是一家经营英文书的书店。里面新书有，更多的是旧书，从地板上一直堆到天花板。它的楼上有13张床，供穷学生住。现在还有学生在那儿免费打工，换取在那儿过夜。但它没有浴室，第二天得到公共厕所用水。我喜欢它的hommy感觉和书的味道，可以在里面坐一下午。伍迪艾伦的新电影“Midnight in Paris”中有它的场景。

贴几张网上搜来的照片。我自己也拍过，现在手头上没有。





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