in 1999, Jeremy Mercer, Montreal fugitive and vagabond in the making, fled to Paris to escape a former life. Winding up at George Whitman’s venerable Shakespeare & Co.—named after the Sylvia Beach original—he found literary refuge among the shelves, the makeshift beds, and the endless cups of tea and pancake dinners. Mostly, he got reprieve from the fellow travelers that also found their own inadvertent route to the store. Mercer’s memoir,Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. was published in 2005, and provides a rich slice from the lives inside the store - from Whitman himself, and his half-French, half-English daughter, Sylvia, to the characters that move in and out of the place, and especially Paris itself—in all its light and dark layered past.
France hold a degree of nobility for its food halls and fromageries, the walls of art, the bygone palaces, the gardens and the cafes that hold the history of the ages. From the macaroons and the cathedrals, to the moon reflecting off the Seine—to be open to the wonders of Paris is to share a pulse with the crown jewel on France’s throne. It’s literary haunts along, are worth the price of admission.
If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go it stays with you. For Paris is a moveable feast. - Ernest Hemingway
