Where readings are given. Notice size of the room and the old floor with lighted glass cover in the middle.

  Checking out…

  Notre-Dame across the street and on the right bank of the Seine

The rose-colored coat. Standard coat colors here are black , grey, brown.  Brightly she goes, indeed!

It’s a sixty year old Parisian bookstore (in its current space) in the heart of a touristy neighborhood almost in the shadow of Cathedrale Notre-Dame. It is in an old beamed building with small galley-sized rooms, crooked floors, narrow winding worn down steps to the second floor, a piano here, a typewriter there, another typewriter in another room. Today there might have been sixty people in a space that really holds about twenty…sixty including a lady with her child in a stroller. There are some spaces where two people cannot pass by one another. But it is full of literary history, ancient books and new books on every conceivable subject. Every author worth his or her mark in history has done a presentation at this place…Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller, Ray Bradbury, and in the original site, founded by Sylvia Beach in 1919…Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Pound. If the walls could talk, they would tell incredible tales. I am a book lover myself, so felt that I must, after all these years, pay a visit to this venerable place and perhaps present members of my family with something inscribed from this store. They are all lovers of les livres themselves.

Shakespeare and Company is getting ready to open a café in an adjacent space and today there was a professional photographer, accompanied by someone with a clipboard who was staging photo shoots for art in the new restaurant. I have to mention this, because I, the lady in the rose-colored coat, seemed always to be in the space that they were going to photograph next and was constantly being asked to please vacate this space for four minutes so the photographer can get her shot. That even extended to the cash register while I was paying for my purchases and arranging for shipping. “Pardon me Madame, but could you step to your left about six inches, because your red sleeve is in the photo.” Oui…for the umpteenth time, I stepped left or right or moved to a different room, dodged the stroller, stepped outside for a breath of fresh air, and finally ended up with two shipments of books going back to the United States….sorry Madame, we cannot ship to a PO box (you know who you are) so that became a challenge. I was in the store for more than two hours. When I departed, they were photographing from the outside in…and wouldn’t you know, I walked right out into the photograph…I’m sure they had to re-do it.

To their credit, the staff of mostly English-speaking individuals were incredibly helpful, were, themselves, working under challenging conditions today because of the photo shoot, and because of many tourists like myself. The young woman who helped me, appeared out of nowhere with answers to my questions, we regrouped shipments after she had gone up and down the stairs numerous times weighing and re-addressing my books, never a sign of frustration or anything but grace under pressure from that young Parisian woman who spoke flawless English. Their motto: Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise. Not sure I felt like much of an angel when I departed the crowded space!!!

This was on my bucket list…I have completed the visit…it was an interesting experience. I’ll be happy to sit at my computer and order my books online, but today I was in the company of all the famous literary ghosts.