Searching for escape from lockdown, the memory travels to a bookstore called Shakespeare and Company, where strangers often found hospitality, remembers tonyowright | OPINION
There was a time, not long before everything changed for all of us, when I stayed in a room in an ancient building right behind the most marvellous bookshop.Shakespeare and Company bookshop, on the Left Bank of the Seine in Paris.You could sit outside Shakespeare and Company and gaze to the gothic towers and the soaring spire of Notre Dame, and listen for the cathedral’s bells calling the faithful to the devotional prayer known as the Angelus.
It is why Sunday nights have felt wonderfully enhanced lately by vicariously travelling the green fields and old cities of Britain with whispering Joanna Lumley on the ABC. Inside is the motto of Shakespeare and Company, misattributed by Whitman to the Irish poet William Butler Yeats: “Be not inhospitable to strangers / Lest they be angels in disguise.”He shoved beds into the spaces between bookshelves and made them available to footloose artists, poets and aspiring writers.
When Whitman died in 2011, his daughter Sylvia - named after Sylvia Beach, the owner of the original Shakespeare and Company, which sat at a different address from 1919 to 1941 - maintained the tradition.Generosity ran all the way from Sylvia Beach’s original store. When a young Ernest Hemingway couldn’t afford books, she lent them to him.- which had faced obscenity charges when serialised earlier in a US journal - she published it herself, causing her considerable financial difficulties.
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