Shakespeare & Company

ist der Name einer der berühmtesten Buchhandlungen der Welt. Sylvia Beach hat diese Buchhandlung bereits 1919 gegründet, musste die Buchhandlung allerdings aufgrund der deutschen Besatzung während des zweiten Weltkriegs 1941 schließen. Erst lange nach dem Krieg hat George Whitman, wieder ein Amerikaner eine Buchhandlung in Paris eröffnet, und zwar 1951. Die Buchhandlung hieß damals "The Mistral Bookshop" und auch Sylvia Beach war bis zu ihrem Tod 1962 gerne Gast hier. Sie hat George Whitman auch den Namen "Shakespeare & Company überlassen, die Buchhandlung wurde aber erst im April 1964 unbenannt: dem 400. Geburtstag von William Shakespeare.

 

Shakespeare and Company ist immer noch als unabhängige Buchhandlung geöffnet.

 

Leider werde ich das Buch schon bald wieder ausgelesen haben, was auch an der unnatürlich großen Schrift liegt.

 

Meine neue Lektüre:

Krista HALVERSON (Hrsg.)

Shakespeare and Company

A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart

Description: A copiously illustrated account of the famed Paris bookstore on its 65th anniversary

 

This first-ever history of the legendary bohemian bookstore in Paris interweaves essays and poetry from dozens of writers associated with the shop: Allen Ginsberg, Anais Nin, Ethan Hawke, Robert Stone and Jeanette Winterson, among others - with hundreds of never-before-seen archival pieces, including photographs of James Baldwin, William Burroughs and Langston Hughes, plus a foreword by the celebrated British novelist Jeanette Winterson and an epilogue by Sylvia Whitman, the daughter of the store's founder, George Whitman. The book has been edited by Krista Halverson, director of the newly founded Shakespeare and Company publishing house.

 

George Whitman opened his bookstore in a tumbledown 16th-century building just across the Seine from Notre-Dame in 1951, a decade after the original Shakespeare and Company had closed. Run by Sylvia Beach, it had been the meeting place for the Lost Generation and the first publisher of James Joyce's Ulysses. (This book includes an illustrated adaptation of Beach's memoir.) Since Whitman picked up the mantle, Shakespeare and Company has served as a home-away-from-home for many celebrated writers, from Jorge Luis Borges to Ray Bradbury, A.M. Homes to Dave Eggers, as well as for young authors and poets. Visitors are invited not only to read the books in the library and to share a pot of tea, but sometimes also to live in the bookstore itself -  all for free.

 

More than 30,000 people have stayed at Shakespeare and Company, fulfilling Whitman's vision of a "socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore." Through the prism of the shop's history, the book traces the lives of literary expats in Paris from 1951 to the present, touching on the Beat Generation, civil rights, May '68 and the feminist movement, all while pondering that perennial literary question, "What is it about writers and Paris?"