#george whitman

[blackswaneuroparedux]

Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.

- W.B. Yeats

This is the quote from W.B. Yeats as a painted sign on the wall as you enter the famous bookstore Shakespeare and Company in Paris.

Strangers always found a welcome at Shakespeare and Company, where they could browse untroubled for hours, especially if they were aspiring writers themselves; and a few – well, a very few – of them may indeed have turned out to be angels, or at least angelic.

The original Shakespeare and Company shop was started in 1921 in the Rue de l’Odéon by Sylvia Beach, the daughter of a US Presbyterian minister. The first writer to patronise the shop was Gertrude Stein, but she fell out with Beach when she took up with James Joyce, whom Stein hated.

Beach published Joyce’s Ulysses when no established publisher would touch it, performing the arduous labour of love of proofreading it. Ernest Hemingway discovered the shop soon after his arrival in Paris, and wrote about it lovingly decades later in A Moveable Feast. When the Germans occupied Paris, Beach refused to sell a signed copy of Finnegans Wake to an invading officer. He said he would return for it the next day. So she moved all the books out and closed the shop. It was “liberated” by Hemingway himself in 1944. However, Beach didn’t have the heart to start again.

In 1948, after a wandering youth and war service, George Whitman came to Paris on the GI Bill, and in 1951 opened an English-language bookshop which he called Le Mistral. A few years later, he moved to the Rue de la Bûcherie, but didn’t rename the shop until after Beach’s death in 1961. He had been too shy to ask her if he could use the name, although they were friends and she used to come to readings at Le Mistral.

Whitman ran his shop as a species of anarchic democracy, even though in some respects he was a benevolent dictator. Anyone who called himself a writer could find a bed there, if there was one free, and stay as long as he liked or until Whitman got tired of him. The only rule for residents was that they must read a book a day and serve in the shop for an hour. One poet, or self-styled poet, who broke the second rule and lay in bed all day reading detective novels was ejected; but his chief offence was his choice of literature rather than his idleness.

The bookshop has its regulars, residents in Paris, not all of them English-speakers by any means, who use it as a sort of club and drop in for conversation and coffee.

Stock control has always been on the casual side. It’s not unknown for someone to lift a book from the shelves, slip it into his pocket, read it and return to sell it for the secondhand shelves the following day.

Inevitably, Shakespeare and Company has long been on the tourist trail, recommended in all the guides. This is just as well, because without their custom it’s hard to see how the shop could have survived. Many are in search of a copy of A Moveable Feast. This is not always on offer because, for some reason which I can’t remember, Whitman took a scunner to Hemingway. The tourists also toss coins into the well in the shop, and it’s not unusual to see an indigent young person lying on the floor and fishing for euros.

On occasion I drop in because the lure of its history is too much even if there are other good independent book stores nearby. Visitors to Paris always want me to take them there and I oblige them even if I feel its lost some of its past glory. Still, I always buy a few books because it’s the best way to support independent book stores in this age of Amazon, as every independent book store needs all the help it can get.

[kiki-de-la-petite-flaque]

Parigi, gennaio 1982.

George Whitman, Allen Ginsberg e Lawrence Ferlinghetti davanti l'ingresso della libreria Shakespeare and Company.

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Goodnight in....Shakespeare & Company Bookstore in Paris, France that allows you to sleep in the store for free in exchange for 2 hours of working in the bookstore, and a one page biography of your life

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“I once expected to spend seven years walking around the world on foot. I walked from Mexico to Panama where the road ended before an almost uninhabited swamp called the Choco Colombiano. Even today there is no road. Perhaps it is time for me to resume my wanderings where I left off as a tropical tramp in the slums of Panama. Perhaps like Ambrose Bierce who disappeared in the desert of Sonora I may also disappear. But after being in all mankind it is hard to come to terms with oblivion - not to see hundreds of millions of Chinese with college diplomas come aboard the locomotive of history - not to know if someone has solved the riddle of the universe that baffled Einstein in his futile efforts to make space, time, gravitation and electromagnetism fall into place in a unified field theory - never to experience democracy replacing plutocracy in the military-industrial complex that rules America - never to witness the day foreseen by Tennyson 'when the war-drums no longer and the battle-flags are furled, in the parliament of man, the federation of the world.'

I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly possessions - just a few old socks and love letters, and my windows overlooking Notre-Dame for all of you to enjoy, and my little rag and bone shop of the heart whose motto is 'Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.' I may disappear leaving no forwarding address, but for all you know I may still be walking among you on my vagabond journey around the world."

[Shakespeare & Company, archived statement]” ― George Whitman

[filmcentury]

Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise. — George Whitman (1913 – 2011), American proprietor of Shakespeare & Company bookstore in Paris

Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares. — Holy Bible, Hebrews 13.2 (King James Version)

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

* * * * “The highest quality of an individual is to be human. The phrase “to be human” means to follow life wherever it may lead, up and down, down and up, from the bottom of the world to the top, from darkness into light, through each degree of good and evil. As the circle of knowledge widens, life grows more beautiful and heroic. We are part of everything—men, books, cities, railroads—all made from the same atoms and molecules, all living together and dying together, joined into one imperishable unity that can never be divided.” ― George Whitman

Yayoi Kusama - Flowers A

[cynthiabertelsen]

A Bookshop in Paris: Living the Dream ... Until a Dictatorship Destroyed Free Thought

Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance. JAMES JOYCE, ULYSSES Shakespeare & Company in 2013 (Wikipedia) Just about every book-loving tourist visiting Paris knows about Shakespeare & Company, a funky and unusual bookshop. Located at 37, Rue de la Bûcherie, overlooking the Seine, with a magnificent view of Notre Dame to boot, it’s usually jam-packed with…

[lascitasdelashoras]

John Sokol: Retratos de autores en sus propias palabras.

George Bernard Shaw: "El camino del héroe"

James Joyce: "Ulises"

Robert Lowell: "History"

William Faulkner: "El sonido y la furia"

Robert Penn Warren : "Audubon"

James Tate: "Riven Doggeries"

John Keats: "Lamia"

Walt Whitman: "Hojas de hierba"

Eudora Welty: "Powerhouse"

Henrik Ibsen: "Hedda Gabler"

Dante Alighieri: "Infierno"

Jorge Luis Borges: "El milagro secreto"

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow: "Salmos de vida"

[serendipity-in-love]

One Fine Day (1996)

[ludmilachaibemachado]

GeorgeHarrison, PattieBoyd, Susan Whitman,Tina Williams, Ringo Starr and Pru Bury🌸🌸🌸

"When I was asking George for his autograph, I said could he sign it for my two sisters as well. He signed his name and put two kisses each for them, but under mine he put seven kisses. I thought he must like me a little." - Pattie Boyd🌸🌸

"What I do remember is the following day, which is when I met Pattie, that we were called by various newspapers and photos were taken as The New Beatles Girls. It all sort of blew up. ... You've got Pattie, who's sort of blonde and Brigitte Bardot looking, and I think they just wanted someone who was opposite of that, which was me." -Pru Bury🌸🌸

"Pattie was very nice to work with. George was different than the other Beatles - quieter. He didn't lark about and joke as much as Paul, John and Ringo did. I noticed that he used to like to sit in a quiet corner and have long conversations. I think this is what attracted Pattie to him - and she was much the same, as George was attracted to her. I still see them about in clubs together and they still seem to enjoy a dark corner and conversing." -Tina Williams (1965)🌸🌸

Via @beatleswomen on Instagram🌸

[amrrhao]

I'm so jealous. I guess it's time I learned how to carve how to carve quartz intaglios.

[affection-and-queries]

Liner notes to the “Asteroid City” soundtrack (ABKCO, 2024):

Cowboys have been singing in movies as long as sound has been in movies. In our case, it was an unusually international group: Jarvis Cocker from Sheffield, South Yorkshire; Seu Jorge from Rio de Janeiro; the French banjo player Jean-Yves Lozac’h; Spanish Pere Mallén on the double bass; young Preston George Mota out of Dallas, Texas; and Rupert Friend from Oxford, England as “Montana” himself. We are pleased to add “Dear Alien” to the sturdy list of cowboy songs performed on the big screen. (Many thanks to Richard Hawley who guided Montana and the Ranch Hands each step of the path.) Other cowboy voices yodel over the radio in the story too: Roy Rogers; Tex Ritter; Slim Whitman; Burl Ives; Spade Cooley; Tennessee Ernie Ford; and the King of Western swing, Bob Wills with his Texas Playboys. Plus: we have our longtime collaborator Alexandre Desplat who composed a unique and wonderful original score which somehow puts us in the territory of extraterrestrial mystery while simultaneously evoking the smell of the greasepaint. We hope you enjoy these four sides of vinyl which might transport you back in time and space to 1955, a small town on the California/Arizona/Nevada desert, a play in three acts called ASTEROID CITY.

Wes Anderson

[acmeoop]

Blind Man’s Buff! “Mighty Samson #23” (1974)

[wanderingmind867]

Hawkeye's leaving again just in time for Yellowjacket to return. Hawkeye's off to try and free Dane Whitman from the 12th century. (Avengers #137):

[gatutor]

Joanne Woodward-Stuart Whitman "Signpost to murder" 1964, de George Englund.

[bi-buddha]