Denis Hirson Says Farewell to Bibliophile George Whitman, Founder of Shakespeare and Company

by Amy on Jan 13th, 2012

Denis Hirson, poet and novelist who has been living in France since 1975, has written a tribute to George Whitman, the Paris-based bibliophile who founded the famous bookshop Shakespeare and Company.

The bookstore has been a cultural icon, becoming the home of the Anglophone literary scene in Paris circa 1951 and having the patronage of customers such as Norman Mailer, William Styron, James Jones, George Plimpton, humorist Art Buchwald, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, TS Eliot, Ford Maddox Ford, F Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, as well as Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller and William Burroughs. Most recently the bookstore made a cameo in Woody Allen’s latest film, Midnight in Paris.

In his tribute, Hirson reports on the funeral of Whitman, celebrating not only his life as a generous ex-GI American who would offer expats refuge, but as someone who established a literary and historical icon:

George Whitman, the man who founded the Mistral Bookshop, later changing its name to Shakespeare and Co., died in Paris on 14th December 2011, two days after his 98th birthday. His funeral took place
at Père Lachaise cemetery on Thursday 22 December. The way the ceremony was thought out was exceptional, the organizers’ generosity palpable; the speakers were uncommonly eloquent and their presence moving in the extreme.

By 3pm, about 200 people had filled the wooden seats or were standing to the sides of the round Salle de la Coupole. Many held a white rose they had been handed at the door. Ahead of them, beyond the cupola and up some low stairs were the shadowed depths of the hall, with a mosaic of a city in panels of bright colour at its far end. To one side stood a group of musicians led by guitarist Alex Freiman and including a saxophone player. They began the ceremony with a low- pitched, lilting, almost hoarse version of “My Funny Valentine” as George Whitman’s plain wooden coffin was borne in by four pallbearers and set down in the central aisle. They later played “Bye Bye Blackbird” and “J’ai deux amours”.

Complete article: Paris Voice

More tributes to Shakespeare and Company:

Shakespeare and Company was only part bookshop; it was also part library, part youth hostel and part cultural shrine. As Anaïs Nin recorded in her Paris diaries of the 1950s: “And there by the Seine was the bookshop… an Utrillo house, not too steady on its foundations, small windows, wrinkled shutters. And there was George Whitman, undernourished, bearded, a saint among his books, lending them, housing penniless friends upstairs, not eager to sell, in the back of the store, in a small overcrowded room, with a desk, a small stove. All those who come for books remain to talk, while George tries to write letters, to open his mail, order books. A tiny, unbelievable staircase, circular, leads to his bedroom, or the communal bedroom, where he expected Henry Miller and other visitors to stay.”

Complete article: Telegraph

More than a distributor of books, Mr. Whitman saw himself as patron of a literary haven, above all in the lean years after World War II, and the heir to Sylvia Beach, the founder of the original Shakespeare & Company, the celebrated haunt of Hemingway and James Joyce.

As Mr. Whitman put it, “I wanted a bookstore because the book business is the business of life.”

Complete article: New York Times

George Whitman, who has died aged 98, was the proprietor of Shakespeare and Company in Paris, probably the world’s most famous bookshop. He took the name from an equally celebrated establishment, from which James Joyce’s novel Ulysses had been published in 1922.

The original Shakespeare and Company, run by Sylvia Beach on Rue de l’Odéon, had closed during the second world war. Whitman opened his first shop in 1951 under a different title, renaming it Shakespeare and Company 13 years later, shortly after Beach’s death. When his only daughter was born in 1981, he named her Sylvia Beach Whitman after his bookselling predecessor. By this time the venture was a celebrated centre of English literature beyond the English-speaking world.

Complete article: Guardian

George Whitman has died. He was 98.

You may not know his name but if you speak English and have ever visited Paris you probably know his bookshop: Shakespeare & Co.

Whitman set up the shop in 1951. He was one of a generation of Americans – mostly ex GI’s on the GI bill – who went to Paris after World War II and tried to re-start the party that made the French capital the center of western culture in the 20′s and 30′s, the place where the Hemingway and Fitzgerald legends were born.

The Paris Review was started. William Styron, Norman Mailer, James Jones, George Plimpton, humorist Art Buchwald and jazz musicians too numerous to mention moved back. There were so many Americans in the city that M-G-M made a Gene Kelly musical about ex-patriot life called “An American in Paris” the year Whitman opened his shop. It won the Best Picture Oscar.

Complete article: Global Post

For decades, Mr. Whitman presided over the store with a benign if somewhat mercurial presence, holding poetry readings and providing free room and board to thousands of would-be Hemingways. It has been featured in books, documentaries and the recent Woody Allen film “Midnight in Paris.”

Mr. Whitman originally called his store, at 37 rue de la Bucherie, Le Mistral.

“I came to Paris in 1946 and stayed on,” he told the Literary Review in 2003. “I started a little lending library for American GIs who had stayed on in Paris. I finally decided I’d open a bookstore here to make room for all my books.”

Complete article: The Washington Post

INDIFFERENT as he was to modern amenities, George Whitman took some convincing to snuff out the candles for good and install electric lights in his Paris bookshop in 1959. His ramshackle labyrinth of dusty nooks and sagging bookshelves, some secured with twisted coat-hangers, was more a commune than a shop. Over the 60 years since he bought the place from an Arab grocer, using inherited money, an estimated 40,000 travellers have slept among the books, on makeshift beds or the floor, in his “socialist Utopia that masquerades as a bookstore”.

Complete article: The Economist

Book details