Shakespeare and Company, Paris.

Paris Wall Newspaper

January 1st 2004

Some people call me the Don Quixote of The Latin Quarter because my head is so far up in the clouds that I can imagine all of us are angels in Paradise. And instead of being a bonafide bookseller I am more like a frustrated store has rooms like chapters in a novel. And the fact is Tolstoy and Doestoyevski are more real to me than my next door neighboors, and even stranger is the fact that even before I was born Doestoyevski wrote the story of my life in a book called 'The Idiot' and ever since reading it I have been searching for the heroine, a girl called Nastasia Filipovna. One hundred years ago my bookstore was a wine shop hidden from the Seine by an annex of the Hotel de Dieu hospital which has since been demolished & replaced by a garden. And further back in the year 1600 our whole building was a monastery called La Maison du Mustier. In medieval time each monastery had a frere lampier whose duty was to light the lamps at nightfall. I have been doing this for fifty years, now it's my daughter's turn.

G.W.