100 Years of Shakespeare & Company Bookstore In Paris

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2. Film, "Portrait of A Bookstore As An Old Man," 2003 (Clip)

- Open Culture, 'Remembering George Whitman.'

In 2005, the Sundance Channel aired Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man, a 52 minute documentary that pays homage to George Whitman, the American founder of the most famous independent bookstore in Paris, Shakespeare and Company. Whitman died yesterday, at age 98, in his apartment above the store.

Sylvia Beach first opened a bookshop named Shakespeare and Company in 1918, and it soon became a home for artists of the "Lost Generation" (Hemingway, Pound, Fitzgerald, Stein, etc.). It also famously published James Joyce's Ulysses in 1922. The shop eventually closed during the Nazi occupation of Paris.

Yet a good decade later, George Whitman came along and established another English-language bookstore on the Left Bank and eventually rechristened it Shakespeare and Company. Whitman's shop gave sanctuary to Beat writers – Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs and the rest. And it's this incarnation of the fabled bookstore that the documentary takes as its subject. Give the documentary some time, and be sure to watch the last five minutes – unless you already know how to cut your hair with fire. It will give you a little feel for Whitman and his well-known eccentricities. RIP.
http://www.openculture.com/2011/12/remembering_george_whitman.html

- Wiki, George Whitman (1913-2011)...With his own collection of one thousand books, Whitman opened his Paris bookstore in 1951 at 37 rue de la Bûcherie on the Left Bank. It was first called Le Mistral, but was later renamed Shakespeare and Company, after Sylvia Beach's earlier Paris bookstore (1919 to 1941). Beach, who visited Whitman's bookstore, is said to have called his shop the "spiritual successor" to her own. Whitman's shop opened just two years before his friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti co-founded City Lights in San Francisco. The two men had met in Paris in 1948.

Since 1951, when the shop opened, Whitman would invite travelers—usually aspiring writers, poets, and artists—to stay in the shop for free. In exchange, they were asked to help out around the bookstore, agree to read a book a day, and write a one-page autobiography for the shop's archives. Whitman called these guests "Tumbleweeds" after the rootless plants that "blow in and out on the winds of chance," as he described. On Sunday mornings, Whitman would traditionally cook his guests a pancake breakfast, brewing up a thin ersatz "syrup" out of some burnt sugar and water. Since 1951, an estimated 30,000 people have slept at Shakespeare and Company in beds found tucked among the shelves of books.

Whitman's only child, Sylvia Whitman, was born in 1981. She now runs Shakespeare and Company with her partner, David Delannet.

George Whitman was awarded the Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2006, one of France's highest cultural honor.

Whitman was the subject of a documentary titled Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man by Gonzague Pichelin and Benjamin Sutherland broadcast on The Sundance Channel in fall 2005. At the end of the film, Whitman trimmed his hair using the flame of a candle, set his hair on fire, and then doused it.

On Wednesday, September 26, 2007, journalist Gerry Hadden's story on George Whitman, his daughter Sylvia Beach Whitman, and Shakespeare and Company aired on NPR's The World (a co-production of the BBC, Public Radio International (PRI), and the Boston radio station WGBH). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Whitman