Shakespeare & Company: The Story is on the Shelves

By Jack Callahan

The windows are dusty in the corners of the grilles, the glass has rippled at the bottoms of the panes, and on this spring morning the leaves of a sprawling tree uncurl just outside. It is Sunday. The smell of coffee. The click of cameras. The bells of Notre Dame. Musty books are stacked two rows deep on wall after wall of crooked shelves in rooms full of old chairs with loose joints and thin cushions, rooms filled with the familiar reverberation of more English than you are used to hearing. Many people come to the rue de la Bûcherie to buy a stamped copy of Ulysses or The ...