George Whitman: 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, which published James Joyce's novel Ulyssesin 1922.
The original Shakespeare and Company, run by Sylvia Beach on Rue de l’Odéon , 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.
Born in East Orange, New Jersey, Whitman moved as a child to Salem, Massachusetts. With his father, a prominent physicist, he spent a year in China as a boy and later travelled extensively in South and Central America, on one occasion becoming lost in a Mexican jungle and being cared for by locals. He attended several universities, including Boston, where he studied journalism, and the Sorbonne in Paris, where he took classes in French.
Whitman first came to France as a medical warrant officer in the US army after the second World War. Wishing to dedicate his energies to literature, but realising that he did not have the writer’s calling, he opened a makeshift library in 1948 in a cheap hotel on Boulevard St Michel. The stock consisted mainly of English and French books picked up from students or the discard shelves at the Sorbonne. Among the visitors to this was the American poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti who remembered “George seated in an armchair in the middle of his tiny room in this third-rate hotel. Books were piled from floor to ceiling on all four sides.”
In 1951, using money from an inheritance, Whitman bought an ancient building at 37 Rue de la Bûcherie, facing Notre-Dame cathedral. It became Whitman’s first bookshop, Le Mistral, but it also lent books to those who could not afford to buy them. It became a meeting place, tea room, a salon for soirees and poetry readings and a matchmaking centre.
His premises were larger than those of the original Shakespeare and Company, and eventually the entire shop became a reading room. Whitman, who in 2006 was appointed Officier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government, mixed new and used books, so that new stock quickly came to look well-used too.
By the mid-1950s a thriving Anglophone literary scene had developed in Paris. George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen and others ran the Paris Review. Its closest rival was Merlin, overseen by the Scottish novelist Alexander Trocchi, with help from the poet Christopher Logue and the future publisher at Grove Press, Richard Seaver. All mingled at Le Mistral. Richard Wright and James Baldwin read from their works in progress and among those who signed books or photographs were Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Durrell, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin.
It was probably at Le Mistral that William Burroughs's Naked Lunchwas first tasted in public. "No one was sure whether to laugh or to be sick," Whitman said later about the apocalyptic sexual feast which – in 1958 – could not be published in Britain or America.
It was eventually taken on by the Olympia Press which, like Whitman’s bookshop, was a supporting pillar of the Left Bank English-language literary scene.
Just over 20 years after Beach closed her doors, in fear of German retaliation following her slighting of an SS officer, Le Mistral became the second Shakespeare and Company.
The distinctive yellow front, with its Shakespeare’s head sign and books in barrows outside, was always a warming sight on the Seine. And it will continue to be so: Sylvia Beach Whitman has given the place some repair and polish, without altering its character.
George Whitman: born, December 12th, 1913; died December 14th, 2011