posted on 17 Feb 2020

Shakespeare and Company: A history of the rag & bone shop of the heart edited by Krista Halverson

There are very few bookshops that become famous in their own right for being legendary institutions but probably the granddaddy of them all must be Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Still open today, you can trace the heritage of the name all the way back to 1919. However, what you might not know is that there have in fact been two completely different shops with that name over that period and although not actually linked, the second one used the name of the first with the full blessing of the original owner.

That original owner was Sylvia Beach who opened her Shakespeare and Company in 1919 and made the shop famous not just as a bookshop but as a publishing house – famously bringing us James Joyce’s Ulysses – and also a place of sanctuary. Beach offered a place to stay for a stream of writers seeking to make a pilgrimage to a city that offered a progressive and liberal environment for those who found themselves political, cultural or sexual outsiders. The list of those passing through is a roll-call of the great writers of the first half of the twentieth century - Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, James Joyce and Ford Madox Ford amongst them.

This first incarnation of the shop survived financial troubles of all kinds and kept going but it couldn’t deal with occupation by the invading German army in 1941 and was forced to close, never to reopen. The hiatus continued for a decade, until the eccentric George Whitman opened his bookshop, Le Mistral, which he modelled on Beach’s shop. In 1964, after Beach had died and on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, Whitman decided to take up the offer of using the name Shakespeare and Company for his store.

It is this later incarnation that this anthology celebrates but without losing sight of Sylvia Beach’s achievements. Krista Halverson has knitted together the chronological story of Whitman’s shop and takes us through to his death at the age of 98 in 2011 when ownership passed to his daughter to continue the legacy.

In much the same way Beach’s shop had, Whitman’s did a similar job in reflecting the nature of the society and the literary community in which it flourished. The charismatic and eccentric Whitman also offered transient writers sanctuary – he called them his ‘tumbleweeds’ – but systematised the way this ad hoc hotel operated. Each tumbleweed was required to give time to working in the shop and they also had to write their biography if they expected to get a bed. The roster of those passing through on their way to literary fame is breath-taking – in fact it might be easier to try and name US or European writers who didn’t find themselves washed up on the doorstep.

What you’ll find in this beautifully produced volume is something akin to a scrapbook of photographs, original documents, written testimonies all sewn together with an overarching narrative telling the tale of tumultuous times, fires, crazy authors and an owner who cuts his hair by setting fire to it.

The good news in all of this is that Whitman’s daughter, initially alienated by being made to live in what became a hippy flop-house, was able, when she was older, to see the vision and potential in the bookshop and to find reconciliation with her father before he died.

This really is a must for anyone who loves the mythology of bookshops and the way it’s been put together makes it a book to read or a book to browse at your own pace. The photography is great and mostly in saturated colour while the written testimonies from the ‘tumbleweeds’ are often more insightful than the overarching narrative.

The book is still only available in hardback I think – which is no bad thing. It’s a book that demands to be hardcover and the £15 or so you’ll have to pay seems modest to me.

 

Terry Potter

February 2020