Photograph by Hannah Swithinbank via Flickr.
The Latin Quarter, in Paris, is pure culture: La Sorbonne university students unraveling books, second-hand shops that display their stalls, an imposing Saint Michel square and mythical bookstores where Hemingway or Miller once sat reading, writing and even sleep. The library in question is called Shakespeare & Company and is located at 37 rue de la Búcherie, on the banks of a river Seine that continues to be the best vantage point for artists and thinkers.
Des bons reves
On the left bank of the Seine, a bookstore continues to operate amid corporate giants like Gibert Jeune, accelerated students, and the sights of Notre Dame. At first glance, Shakespeare & Co. might seem like just another bookstore of the many that make up the Saint Michel area and the Latin Quarter, cultural paradises in which to lose yourself during any visit to the French capital.
However, as we enter and pass through an arch formed only of books, the stairs seem to be supported on beams formed by copies of The Odyssey or The Grapes of Wrath and at the end of a corridor red curtains cover what appears to be a bed . Of course.
It all started in 1919, the year in which the former American homeland Sylvia Beach opened a bookstore on rue Dupuytren called Shakespare & Co. Throughout those years this bookstore was a haven for culture and censored writers in Anglo-Saxon countries, see James Joyce's Ulysses or the members of a Lost Generation led by Ernest Hemingway or Henry Miller, regulars of this bookstore during his years in Paris.
After World War II, the bookstore did not reopen after various conflicts with German officers. It would be in 1951 when George Whitman, an American soldier, inaugurated Shakespare & Co. on rue de la Búcherie, which emulated the Beach project, becoming, in turn, a refuge for the Beat Generation of those 50s in which from Julio Cortázar to William S. Burroughs they dropped into its corridors.
In turn, the bookstore offered writers the option of sleeping there as long as certain requirements were met: spending a couple of hours dispatching and ordering books in the bookstore and taking advantage of their stay to read and write within the same premises. Two "obligations" that are a delight for contemporary writers in search of accommodation and new stimuli in the city of love.
These guests are called tumbleweeds (or plants that roll) as a tribute to those nomadic artists who decide to live in the bowels of a bookstore in which to promote literature, form a pineapple with other travelers and promote literary creation among its shelves as an exclusive guarantee to pay for a few days of lodging in this, according to Miller, "wonderland of books."
And now is when you regret spending an afternoon browsing through your books without knowing that the "B&B option" was included.
Would you like to sleep in this bookstore?
Hello Alberto.
I would love to sleep in it as long as the bed is comfortable, of course. I imagine they will have a good supply of bedding to change every two to three.
I already knew about the existence of this bookstore. I suspect that it is the most famous and the most visited in Paris. And if not, surely it is among the first.
He had never heard of the "tumbleweeds."
A literary greeting from Oviedo.
This bookstore is beautiful, I had the opportunity to visit it last year. Nowadays you don't have to be a writer to be able to sleep there, you just need a passion for books and give in return some work as you mentioned. All the best.