Readers well-versed in the history of that scene will notice a clever bit of attempted predestination on George Whitman’s part in naming his daughter after Sylvia Beach, the American founder of another famous bookstore called Shakespeare and Company, which operated from 1921 to 1941. While practically every bookstore in business today takes pains to set itself apart as something “more than just a bookstore,” Shakespeare and Company has been hip to that plan since its inception, offering a reading library, Sunday tea, a storied makeshift writers’ colony, and a taste of the early twentieth-century’s expatriate-filled Parisian literary scene. His store Shakespeare and Company has sent a beacon from Paris’ Left Bank to writers and bibliophiles the world over for sixty years, and it continues to do so under Whitman’s daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman. Last December, we featured the documentary Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man in tribute to its recently passed subject, noted bookseller and eccentric George Whitman.
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