musings from a parisian bookshop

I heard someone say once that bookshops are dreams built of wood and paper. My favorite lies on the Left Bank of Paris, nestled between a peaceful garden to left and the bustle of the Latin Quarter to the right. This quiet and unassuming bookstore is richer in history than the camembert sold down the street is in taste. The green facade of Shakespeare and Company is coyishly camouflaged by the pop-up park separating the shop from the Seine. Across the water, Notre Dame rises like the bestial queen she is as throngs of tourists flock to her embrace, leaving the dear bookshop unnoticed and untainted. Before you even step inside, you are met with an outdoor display of resale books and an immediate awe of the history and significance of the store.

Once inside, it’s everything you’d expect and hope a crooked old bookstore would be. It honestly feels more like an old haunted house that’s full of books and ghosts of writers past than an operational book seller. You can barely walk inside because of the innumerable amount of books piled high like treacherous peaks that threaten to avalanche at every step. The narrow pathways aren’t ideal for traffic flow and the lanes are constantly congested with literary hopefuls--it’s always rush hour at Shakespeare and Company. It’s dark and cramped inside, and the slanting ceiling doesn’t bode well for claustrophobics. If you have asthma, beware; the glorious, musty smell of rotting pages might suffocate you. Once you get used to the altitude, though, you’ve never breathed easier.

The store is sectioned off by genre, intended to reflect chapters in a book. Classics from this time period, here. Beat poets, there. Books about travel and France, to the right. Naturally, I find my way to the poet’s corner. It’s tucked away, behind the section that houses the Austens and Brontes of the literary monarchy. Jane has an entire shelf of her own--“All hail the Queen,” as they say. Her court includes the likes Victor Hugo, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ernest Hemingway, along with newer, upcoming, slightly less refined authors-in-waiting. Bowing before them is a humble wishing well asking passersby to “feed the starving writers” that live within the shop’s walls. In the poet’s corner, secluded and less traveled by, I meet my old friends Dickinson and Ginsberg. Frost and Byron are there too, but Tennyson is seducing me with his talk of sailing beyond sunsets and Sir Lancelot. Nobody’s watching, so I think I’ll take him home with me. I traverse the back wall and pay my respects to Mr. Shakespeare himself before heading upstairs. The wooden steps creak and bend with every shift of weight as I duck to avoid the head-to-ceiling collision.

The second floor: the guardrail on the highway where all the Tumbleweeds cluster together. You can see their beds in the piano room, to the right of the stairs. All the old encyclopedias are housed there, along with a piano that’s free to play. There are two beds in the piano room, each in opposite corners. Some people dream about sleeping amongst the stars, but I can’t help wonder what it’d be like to sleep amongst these books. My favorite Tumble-bed is the one in the children’s section. The children’s section is a little alcove between the stairs and the piano room. It’s set up like a theatre. Books lining the walls that lead to a little reading nook. Red drapes, like curtains on a stage, hang from the ceiling and shelter a bed that lies above the alcove. Invisible, but you can see it if you know where to look. Shotgun to the children’s theatre is the front reading room. There’s a table in front of a giant window that looks out onto the Seine below and Notre Dame across the water. As you make your way into this front room, there’s a little cut out in the wall. It’s a tiny office with a desk, a typewriter, a broken chair, and a pen and a pad of paper. This little office is only big enough for one person at a time, even then it’s too small. I sit down at the chair and look at the office’s three walls. There is hardly any empty space on the walls as they have been covered with notes from people all over the world. Thank you letters, favorite quotes, addresses for potential pen pals. I pick up the pen and, with a little encouragement from my new lover, I jot down a wish: “I want to be a chapter in your story.”