PAUL CLEMENTS pays homage at one of the world’s most celebrated bookshops on its 60th birthday

DESPITE the I have just settled into a creaky armchair to browse my carefully chosen selection of books when the serenity of the moment is broken by two teenage boys bursting into Fur Elise on an ancient Schindler piano.

Their short recital attracts a small audience at the entrance to an inner door of Shakespeare and Company bookshop underneath a sign: “Be Not Inhospitable to Strangers, Lest they be Angels in Disguise”.

When the shop was founded in 1951 by George Whitman this part of Paris was a slum with junkyards, dingy hotels and wine shops; today, bistros and trendy cafes line the surrounding traffic-filled streets of the area beside the Seine. Whitman, who came from Salem, Massachusetts, still takes an interest in the shop even at the age of 97. He used to sleep on a mattress amongst the books but retired in 2006 and now lives in an apartment upstairs. His daughter Sylvia runs the business.

Set in the heart of Paris, the shop has flourished in the intervening 60 years into a venerable cultural and literary institution, the first stop for visiting bibliophiles. The original Shakespeare and Company bookshop was opened in rue de l’Odéon in 1919 by a young American, Sylvia Beach, and became a haunt for English-speaking writers. Its main claim to fame was that in 1922 it published James Joyce’s Ulysses then banned in every English-speaking country in the world.

When Whitman took over the shop in 1951 it was called le Mistral. Today, his nickname for it is the ‘Rag and Bone shop of the heart’. With its cramped corners and hidden alcoves it’s a ramshackle place. The heady bohemian days have long gone but the shop still has the look and feel of a hippie commune. Young people sit on velveteen benches while Colette the black Labrador, and Kitty the black and white cat, sniff around feet.

The shop calls its writers “Tumbleweeds” after the rootless plants that drift in the wind. In return for a free warm bed for the night in the “Tumbleweed Hotel”, all they need to do is two hours’ shelving a day. And they do an efficient job of organizing the stock in subject categories. Shelves house a huge selection of fiction while non-fiction features biography and memoir, history, philosophy, travel, art, music, film and drama. The muse is well represented; a tall wooden ladder stretches up to high shelves in Poet’s Corner with thousands of slim volumes from Peter Abbs’ The Flowering Flint to the Selected Poems of Louis Zukofsky.

An extensive Shakespeare section contains the playwright’s work in the Oxford Library and Everyman’s Library editions. Appropriately there is a run of novels by Hemingway, a regular in the original shop who wrote about it in his memoir A Moveable Feast. The uneven ground floor is filled with new titles while the first floor is a warren of library books not for sale but for borrowing. Many are piled high in higgledy-piggledy fashion with a room for relaxing while you read. During my visit two young girls – one asleep and the other leafing through a book – lie on a mattress against a wall. On the pin board amongst a score of fliers a sign reads: “Jazz singer with literary pretensions seeks flat to share.”

Unusual items can be picked up but you have to invest time searching and burrowing deep into the stacks and in cardboard boxes overflowing with old and literary magazines such as Encounter. A glass case holds the books of the Beat Generation published by the famed City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco featuring Kerouac, Ginsberg and Ferlinghetti.

From an upstairs cubby hole comes a seldom-heard sound: the clunking keys of an Underwood manual typewriter that looks older than the shop. A baseball capped Tumbleweed taps out a letter surrounded by postcards and sepia-tinted pictures of the owner. Under the stairs, on two conjoined seats with an ex-cinema look about them, a Spanish couple flirts amongst the crime and mystery paperbacks.

There’s always something in the offing with weekly Monday night readings, workshops and a biennial festival. Next door to the main bookshop is a smaller antiquarian sister shop specializing in modern first editions where prices are higher and where few seem to venture. Henry Miller called Shakespeare and Company a ‘wonderland of books.’ Today his quotation on the tiled floor is almost indistinguishable with the passage of so many footsteps: “Sometimes I think I am surrounded by insects masquerading as men for some diabolical reason.”

Spend a while here and you realize nothing in the online world masquerading as a bookshop beats the satisfaction that the serendipity of a well-stocked bookshop can bring. Some copies are dust covered or come with torn wrappers, and frail papers smell of age but there is not an e-book kindle in sight. In a world of behemoth lookalike bookshops, this is a one-of-a-kind place. The only BlackBerrys in here are the black berets worn by customers.

My hand-picked haul includes titles to feed my Francophile travel interest: Bernard Levin’s walk across France: From the Camargue to the Alps, Rosemary Bailey’s Love and War in the Pyrenees, and the intriguingly entitled Courtship of Sea Creatures, by Jean-Pierre Otte, described as a ‘playful meditation on the sexual strategies of sea life found along the shores of Brittany’. Who could resist it? My final purchase for an ‘on location’ read is Paris Tales, a collection of stories by some French literary big-hitters including Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola as well as contemporary writers such as Anna Gavalda and Frédéric Beigbeder.

Ninety minutes has elapsed since I crossed the threshold leaving behind the hurly-burly of the city streets. It’s Holy Week and the bells of Notre-Dame Cathedral are booming across the square reverberating around Parvis Notre-Dame and Place Jean-Paul II; twilight produces a melancholy glow. Time to repair to the terrace of Café de Flore and over a large café crème practice my pretence of being French delving into Guy de Maupassant conjuring up a Parisian world of long ago…a little of which remains time-capsuled at 37 rue de la Bucherie.

FACT FILE ON PARIS

Flights: Aer Lingus operates three daily flights from Dublin to Paris Charles de Gaulle Airport. For more information on fares and schedules, visit www.aerlingus.com.

Accommodation: Hotel Malte Opera, 63 rue du Richelieu, 75002. Double rooms from €190 per night including breakfast, www.astotel.com/hotel-malte-opera-paris.php.

Shakespeare and Company is at 37 rue de la Bucherie, Tel: 0033 1432 54093, open weekdays, 10am-11pm, weekends, 11am-11pm - www.shakespeareandcompany.com.

Paris Tourism Office, 25 rue des Pyramides, 75001. Tel: 0033 892 68 3000, www.parisinfo.com.