The Man Called Brown Condorby Thomas E. Simmons has been accepted for inclusion in the coveted Shakespeard and Company Book Store Library in Paris. Go to www.shakespeareandcompany.com .
Time listed the bookstore as number 4 of 10 things to do in Paris. Simmons’ friend, Bobbye Carraway, sent the book to Sylvia Whitman (see below). Ms. Whitman sent Simmons the following card: “Dear Thomas, thank you very much for the kind gift of your wonderful book, THE MAN CALLED BROWN CONDOR. We will add it to our library so many people can enjoy it.”
Bobbye Carraway (who has stayed at the book store in Paris) said that Ms. Whitman said in effect: “We get thousands of book a year submitted, but only a handful do we place in our library. This book is wonderful and we will place it in our library.”
Sylvia Beach’s Bookstore
Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate from New Jersey, established Shakespeare and Company in 1919 at 8 rue Dupuytren. The store functioned as a lending library as well as a bookstore.[5] In 1921, Beach moved it to a larger location at 12 rue de l’Odéon, where it remained until 1940.[1] During this period, the store was the center of Anglo-American literary culture and modernism in Paris. Writers and artists of the “Lost Generation,” such as Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, George Antheil and Man Ray, spent a great deal of time there, and it was nicknamed “Stratford-on-Odéon” by James Joyce, who used it as his office.[6] Its books were considered high quality and reflected Beach’s own taste. The store and its literary denizens are mentioned in Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast. Patrons could buy or borrow books like D. H. Lawrence’s controversial Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which had been banned in Britain and the United States.
Beach published Joyce’s book Ulysses in 1922. It, too, was banned in the United States and Britain. Later editions were also published under the Shakespeare and Company imprint.[7]
The original Shakespeare and Company closed on 14 June 1940, during the German occupation of France in World War II.[2] It has been suggested that it may have been ordered shut because Beach denied a German officer the last copy of Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.[8] When the war ended, Hemingway “personally liberated” the store, but it never re-opened.[9]
George Whitman’s Bookstore
In 1951, another English-language bookstore was opened on Paris’s Left Bank by American George Whitman, under the name of Le Mistral. Its premises, the site of a 16th-century monastery,[10] are at 37 rue de la Bûcherie, near Place Saint-Michel, just steps from the Seine, Notre Dame and the Île de la Cité.[10] Much like Shakespeare and Company, the store became the focal point of literary culture in bohemian Paris, and was frequented by many Beat Generation writers, including Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William S. Burroughs.[10]
In 1964, after Sylvia Beach’s death, Whitman renamed his store “Shakespeare and Company” in tribute to the original, describing the name as “a novel in three words”.[3] He called the venture “a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore”.[11] Customers have included the likes of Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and Richard Wright. The bookstore has sleeping facilities, with 13 beds, and Whitman claimed that as many as 40,000 people have slept there over the years.[11]
George Whitman died at the age of 98 on December 14, 2011. His daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman, now runs the store. Regular activities are Sunday tea, poetry readings and writers’ meetings.[12]
The four Shakespeare and Company bookstores in New York City, which opened starting in 1981, are not affiliated with the Paris store.
Sylvia Whitman
Sylvia Whitman continues to run the store in the same manner as her father, allowing young writers to live and work there.[12] She started a literary festival, FestivalandCo, which is held biennially at the shop. It has hosted such writers as Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, Jeanette Winterson, Jung Chang and Marjane Satrapi.[13][12] She appeared on the Paris episodes of The Late Late Show with Craig Ferguson, which aired the week of August 1, 2011.
