Shakespeare and Company, Paris

Book excerpt: For almost 70 years, Shakespeare and Company, the English-language bookstore in Paris, has been a home-away-from-home for celebrated writers--including Jorge Luis Borges, James Baldwin, A. M. Homes, and Dave Eggers--as well as for young, aspiring authors and poets. Visitors are invited to read in the library, share a pot of tea, and sometimes even live in the shop itself, sleeping in beds tucked among the towering shelves of books. Since 1951, more than 30,000 have slept at the "rag and bone shop of the heart." This first, fully illustrated history of the bookstore draws on a century's worth of never-before-seen archives. Photographs and ephemera are woven together with personal essays, diary entries, and poems from more than seventy contributors, including Allen Ginsberg, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Sylvia Beach, Nathan Englander, Dervla Murphy, Jeet Thayil, David Rakoff, Ian Rankin, Kate Tempest, and Ethan Hawke. With hundreds of images, it features Tumbleweed autobiographies, precious historical documents, and beautiful photographs, including ones of such renowned guests as William Burroughs, Henry Miller, Langston Hughes, Alberto Moravia, Zadie Smith, Jimmy Page, and Marilynne Robinson. Tracing more than 100 years in the French capital, the story touches on the Lost Generation and the Beats, the Cold War, May '68, and the feminist movement--all while reflecting on the timeless allure of bohemian life in Paris.--Adapted from dust jacket and publisher website.