November 2014 Issue

In a Bookstore in Paris

Perhaps the most famous independent bookstore in the world, Shakespeare and Company can feel like something of a literary utopia, where money takes a backseat and generations of writers—Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, William Styron, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Dave Eggers, among others—have found a Paris home. Chronicling the life of its late owner, the eccentric, irascible, and visionary George Whitman, Bruce Handy meets Shakespeare’s greatest asset in the age of Amazon: Whitman’s daughter, Sylvia.
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Shakespeare and Company, arguably the most famous independent bookstore in the world, occupies a prime piece of real estate facing the Seine in Paris, not far from the Latin Quarter, Place Saint-Michel, and Boulevard Saint-Germain. The river is just a stone’s throw from the front door, and a strong ultimate-Frisbee player could probably nail the south side of Notre Dame—halfway across the Seine on Île de la Cité—from one of the shop’s second-floor windows. The view is that good.

Strolling up to the store’s early 17th-century building on a one-block stretch of Rue de la Bûcherie, with its small half-plaza in front, its weather-beaten bookstalls, its green-and-yellow façade, its hand-hewn, rustic-looking signage, can feel like entering a time warp to a quieter, older Paris—a little bit Beat Generation, a little bit Victor Hugo. That is, until you notice a queue waiting to get into the store, as there often is on weekends and during the busy summer months, or a group of tourists stopping on the sidewalk to snap photos. There might also be an outdoor reading taking place, as there was on an early evening last spring, when a California poet could be heard reciting sexually explicit work from her collection Pussy. Tourists, customers, dirty poems, a crowd of 40 or 50 mostly attentive listeners; Colette, the shop dog, a friendly black mutt who wandered into and out of the crowd; a homeless man who stopped to listen with one eye on a table stocked with glasses of wine intended for a post-reading fête; slanting sunlight—all coexisted in splendid fashion, the tableau like a bookish, modern-day Brueghel. Or you might have preferred the evening in July when Zadie Smith was reading inside the store while a hardy, overflow crowd listened from the sidewalk despite a steady rain, the patterns of dozens of opened umbrellas evoking a Pierre Bonnard canvas while Smith’s voice, on speakers, mimicked the inflections of 21st-century London. There are reasons this English-language bookshop is a destination, far from Amazon.

Unfortunately, as former patrons of the demolished Rizzoli bookstore on West 57th Street, in Manhattan, know, these are perilous times for independent bookstores squatting on valuable acreage. (Happily, Rizzoli will reopen next year in a new location off Madison Square Park.) In recent years, Shakespeare and Company, which owns its space, has had to fend off waves of potential buyers—sometimes very pushy ones. Boutique hoteliers have eyed the building hungrily, and not long ago, the owner of a kebab chain popped in to the store’s rare-book annex, circled an imperious finger in the air to indicate the entire operation, and asked, point-blank, “How much?” Happily, the answer has remained a firm Non.

The real threat to this bookshop has been dynastic. It is a question that has plagued many creative enterprises, from movie studios to museums to TV series: how do you preserve and extend the work of a founding visionary when that visionary is no longer on hand? Walt Disney and Steve Jobs might have liked to know. In the case of Shakespeare’s, as the store is known informally, the short answer is you get lucky. A slightly longer answer is you have a remarkable daughter.

It is not true, as the store’s workers have sometimes overheard passing tour guides proclaim, that James Joyce lies buried in the cellar. (If only. He was laid to rest at a conventional, non-bookselling cemetery in Zurich.) But the store’s roots do indeed reach back to the Shakespeare and Company that Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate, owned in Paris in the 1920s and 30s. As every English major knows, her bookshop and lending library became a hangout for Lost Generation writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Joyce, whose Ulysses was first published in its complete form by Beach because authorities in Britain and America deemed it obscene. She closed up shop during the Nazi occupation and never reopened. But her mantle was taken up by another American, George Whitman, who opened the present-day store in 1951, just as Beat Generation writers were finding their way to the Left Bank. (The so-called Beat Hotel, which would become a Parisian equivalent to New York’s Chelsea Hotel as a flophouse for writers, artists, and musicians, was only a few blocks away.) Writers who logged time at the current Shakespeare and Company, sometimes even sleeping there—Whitman was possibly keener on extending hospitality to authors, lauded or not, than on selling their books—include Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Lawrence Durrell, Anaïs Nin, James Jones, William Styron, Ray Bradbury, Julio Cortázar, James Baldwin, and Gregory Corso. Another early visitor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, co-founded his City Lights Bookstore, in San Francisco, as a sister institution two years after Shakespeare’s opened. William S. Burroughs pored over Whitman’s collection of medical textbooks to research portions of Naked Lunch; he also gave what may have been the first public reading from his novel-in-progress at the store. (“Nobody was quite sure what to make of it, whether to laugh or be sick,” Whitman later said.) Aside from Zadie Smith, more recent generations have been represented at the store by Martin Amis, Dave Eggers, Carol Ann Duffy, Paul Auster, Philip Pullman, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Lethem, Lydia Davis, Charles Simic, A. M. Homes, Darin Strauss, Helen Schulman (my wife, I should note), and the list goes on. Nathan Englander, the American novelist, was married here in 2012. (A happy first for the store!)

As well, an estimated 30,000 aspiring writers have bunked at Shakespeare’s over the decades, sleeping on intermittently bedbug-infested cots and benches scattered throughout the store in exchange for a couple of hours of work a day and a promise to spend at least some of their downtime reading and writing; a one-page autobiography is mandatory. “Tumbleweeds,” Whitman dubbed these aspirational itinerants. Robert Stone wrote parts of his first novel, A Hall of Mirrors, while “tumbleweeding” in 1964, though to hear him tell it he expended far more energy getting “absolutely blasted” and listening to Radio Luxembourg late into the night. A Tumbleweed of recent vintage, C. J. Flood, a British writer whose first young-adult novel was published earlier this year, characterizes the experience in terms I imagine would apply to many a past, present, and future Tumbleweed: “I didn’t get as much writing done during my time there as I intended, but I certainly felt like a writer.”

Authors, I’ve observed, are grateful to stumble across any sort of bookstore these days, even a battered old rack of pharmacy paperbacks, but Shakespeare’s inspires more than just the usual brief reprieve from whistling past the graveyard. Many compare it to a cathedral or temple, though not in a solemn vein. “It is definitely Dionysus’s favorite bookstore,” Ethan Hawke wrote me; the actor and author has been a fan since he turned up in Paris alone at the age of 16 and crashed at the store for five or six nights after wandering over, curious, from Notre Dame. In an e-mail, Dave Eggers, who first visited Shakespeare’s as a backpacker in his 20s, recalled his initial impression: “an absurd place—almost down to the last crooked corner and narrow staircase, [it was] the bookstore of my dreams.”

You know who else loved Shakespeare and Company and who wasn’t a writer with skin in the game? Frank Sinatra—according, that is, to Ed Walters, a former pit boss at the Sands, in Las Vegas, who was taken under Sinatra’s wing in the 1960s and offered this account for a forthcoming history the store plans to publish:

What few Sinatra fans know is that he loved books, especially history books. He was in the casino at a 21 table, playing blackjack and talking with his friends. He told the guys, “I’m giving Eddie some books to educate him. He needs it.”

He asked about a book he’d given me, was I reading it. He said, “Eddie you must travel and when you do, go to Paris, go to the Shakespeare bookstore. I know the guy there. . . . Go see the guy George—he’s a guy that lives with the books.”

Whitman died on December 14, 2011, two days after his 98th birthday. Unlike many once young bohemians and idealistic self-proclaimed Communists, he hewed to his ideals all the way through to the end. He made a fetish of thriftiness, sometimes cooking from restaurant and market leavings for himself and guests. Unwilling to pay for haircuts, he trimmed his by lighting it on fire with candles. (You can see him do so in a video on YouTube that is equal parts beguiling and horrifying.) His one concession to fashion: a grotty paisley jacket he wore for decades and which had already seen better days when the poet Ted Joans described it as never-been-cleaned in 1974. In short, he was the rare businessman who cared little for money except as a vehicle to expand his shop, which over the decades grew from a single ground-floor room into the multi-floor, ad-hoc institution it is today. In a eulogy he wrote for Whitman, Ferlinghetti described Shakespeare and Company as “a literary octopus with an insatiable appetite for print, taking over the beat-up building … room by room, floor by floor, a veritable nest of books.” I like to think of it as a half-planned, half-accreted, site-specific folk-art masterpiece: the Watts Towers of bookselling, with its warren of narrow passageways lined by casually carpentered bookshelves; its small rooms adorned with whimsical names (OLD SMOKY READING ROOM and BLUE OYSTER TEAROOM); its owner’s favorite epigrams painted above doorways and on steps (LIVE FOR HUMANITY and BE NOT INHOSPITABLE TO STRANGERS LEST THEY BE ANGELS IN DISGUISE); its scavenged floorings, including, in one of the ground-floor rooms, marble tiling Whitman is said to have stolen decades ago from Montparnasse Cemetery and laid down in an abstract mosaic around the store’s “wishing well”—a hole in which customers toss coins to be harvested by the store’s more impecunious residents. (Sign: FEED THE STARVING WRITERS.)

Sinatra was right, by the way: Whitman did live with the books, eventually taking a small apartment on the building’s fourth floor (or third, by French floor-numbering convention), which was really just an extension of the store. His own back bedroom had three walls of bookshelves, double-lined with books: novels, poetry, biographies, philosophy, complete sets of Freud and Jung—pretty much anything you can think of, plus the detective novels he kept stashed under his pillows. That bedroom is where, following a stroke, he passed away, so Sinatra could have said he died with the books, too.

That apartment is where Whitman also tried to raise a family in the 1980s, where his daughter and only child, Sylvia Whitman, now 33, spent the first half-dozen or so years of her life, before her parents separated and she and her father suffered a years-long estrangement. But she would return to Shakespeare’s as a young woman, not only nursing her increasingly frail father through his final years—not easy when he refused to see doctors and lived in a fourth-floor apartment in a sometimes literally crumbling building without an elevator—but also shepherding his store into the 21st century. (Her first innovation: a telephone.)

Research any subject that involves talking to novelists and poets and you will soon possess an overstock of literary metaphors. Is George Don Quixote or Prospero or Lear? Is Sylvia Cordelia or Prospero’s Miranda? The novelist and V.F. contributing editor A. M. Homes, who has been devoted to Shakespeare and Company since she first visited Paris, in the 1970s, as a Beat-obsessed teenager—“I used to think Jack Kerouac was my father, but that’s another story”—likens Sylvia to a fairy-tale princess who has been tasked, or privileged, with tending a magic portal. Eggers said much the same, and I’ll run with it, too, and not just because Shakespeare’s is an enchanting place and George, if you squint, a sort of wizard-like figure; and not just because of Sylvia’s uncommon charm and grace, and her “seraphic” blond hair (hat tip to the poet Deborah Landau and Paris Review editor Lorin Stein for that plum adjective); and not just because she was barely an adult when she took on the store, which meant taking on her father; but also because, in the way of so many fairy tales, her patrimony came with a riddle attached.

George Whitman left behind a remarkable collection of papers which people at the shop call archives, but which, in their native state, were monstrous, avalanche-ready piles of letters, documents, photographs, ledgers, ephemera, borderline trash, and sometimes actual trash. Stray dollars, francs, and euros, too. Krista Halverson, a former editor of Francis Ford Coppola’s literary magazine, Zoetrope, had the sometimes delightful, sometimes frightening task of weeding through it all as Shakespeare’s archivist and author of the store’s forthcoming history. “With every piece of paper you picked up, there could be no assumption of what it would be,” she told me. “I found a résumé of someone who just wanted to work at the bookstore, from maybe 1976, stuck to a letter from Anaïs Nin—stuck to it with a dead cockroach.” (It’s true: I saw the stain.)

More than two and a half years after his death, conversations at the bookstore often come around to George, which is how everyone refers to him, even his daughter. “I don’t think I’d say I ever had a normal conversation with George, a conversation where we sat opposite each other and had an exchange. It was always like a theater piece—a performance,” Sylvia told me when she and David Delannet, her partner (both at the store and in raising their infant son, Gabriel), sat with me for a series of interviews. We first met in their offices, a cheerful, light-filled space on the top floor of the Shakespeare and Company building, a long room with sloping walls that sits at a pleasant, if elevator-less, remove from the busy, book-lined catacomb five flights below.

It is a truth universally acknowledged in the literary world that Sylvia is possessed of movie-star looks, but David, raised in Paris by an English mother and an French father, is no slouch, resembling, to my mind, a more refined version of Jean-Paul Belmondo. He met Sylvia in 2006, at the store—he spotted her in a window and invented some excuse about a book he was looking for—while he was finishing his doctorate in philosophy at the Sorbonne. They started dating, and soon, he found, he was dating the shop as well.

“For me,” David said, picking up Sylvia’s thread, “every conversation with George was like a game, a spiritual game. You’d never have anything straight from him, like ‘Pass me the sugar.’ ” Rather, he might have launched into a dinner-party recitation of Walt Whitman or Yeats. Or not spoken at all, merely presided.

He could be welcoming. He could be gruff. He could be charismatic. He could be aloof. “George was not easy,” said Mary Duncan, an American academic and writer who has lived off and on in Paris for more than three decades and is a longtime friend of the shop’s. “I mean, one day George loved you, the next day he would hardly speak to you. But you learned that this would blow over. If you took it personally, you were going to be miserable.” This was, after all, a man who on occasion expressed himself by throwing books at people, sometimes affectionately, sometimes less so—a love-hate gesture, or so it sounds, not unlike Ignatz Mouse hurling bricks at an eternally besotted Krazy Kat.

He was handsome, slender, patrician-looking, his one visible boho affectation a tufted goatee he had for much of his life. A short mid-1960s documentary about the store depicts a man, then in his 50s, who moved with an angular, almost insect-like grace; he looks as if he could have been a modern dancer or a silent comedian. Sebastian Barry, the Irish author, was a Tumbleweed in the early 1980s. He remembers George at that stage as “wonderfully grizzled and magnificently cross-looking,” given to communicating through “enigmatic growls and sudden volleys of truncated wit fired out from his chair behind the counter.” In an e-mail, Barry wrote, “What I didn’t realize at the time is that he was a wonderful fictional construct himself—he had written himself into existence on the Paris air, and just like a novel, I shouldn’t have expected everything to tally or even be especially true.”

I can vouch for that: in all my years as a journalist, I’ve never seen a clipping file so full of contradictory information. For instance, George liked to tell interviewers he was a cousin or nephew or even the bastard grandson of Walt Whitman. In truth, he was no relation to the poet, although his father, a physics professor, was indeed named Walt. Sylvia and David have had to sic fact-checkers on George’s biography to straighten out basic details for the Shakespeare and Company history—even simple stuff, such as where he went to college. (He got his undergraduate degree at Boston University and later briefly enrolled at Harvard.)

Lawrence Ferlinghetti describes himself as George’s oldest friend, yet he too found George tough to crack. “I always said he was the most eccentric man I ever met,” said Ferlinghetti, who, by the way, knows from eccentricity.

At root, his friends and family told me, George was a profoundly shy man, albeit one with a countervailing gene for hospitality. Sylvia and David recounted a dinner party George once threw to which he had invited the equally shy Samuel Beckett; the two men spent the evening simply staring at each other. “George was always the person who was creating a tea party or a dinner, inviting all sorts of people, but then he would leave, just go into a corner and start reading,” Sylvia said. “I think he loved communal life but didn’t always want to be the center of it.”

He also had a knack for inspiring young writers to believe in themselves. The following anecdote isn’t literary per se, but it well captures that side of George. One night, during the 1968 student riots, Christopher Cook Gilmore, a future Tumbleweed who would return to the store repeatedly until his death, in 2004, was fleeing a huge cloud of tear gas and a mob of angry, baton-swinging riot police (the Compagnies Républicaines de Sécurité, commonly known by the abbreviation C.R.S.). As he told the story in a 2003 documentary about George, Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man, “I was running for my life. . . . Every shop was closed, and every door was locked, and I was hoping that I could get to the Seine and jump in. . . . [Then] I see this light inside a crazy old bookstore and there’s an old man at the desk; he’s all alone. I run in the door. I’m wearing an American football helmet. I have a scarf across my face. . . . I look at him and say, ‘C.R.S.!’ And he says, ‘Get upstairs!’ He flicks off the lights, shuts the door, and we both run up. We see [the police] run by screaming and pounding the cobblestones. . . . And the old man looks at me, grabs my arm, and says, ‘Isn’t this the greatest moment of your entire life?’ And that’s how I first met George Whitman.”

George was born in New Jersey in 1913; he grew up in an academic, middle-class home in Salem, Massachusetts. Following college, in 1935, he struck out on what he called a “Bohemian Holiday,” a four-year, 3,000-mile trek across North and South America (with a side trip to Hawaii) in search of what he called “seductive mysteries and extravagant adventures.” He found some, but in his unpublished travel diaries and letters, he seems as preoccupied with the libraries he visited and the books and readers he encountered as he is with jungles and deserts, urban back alleys and the wisdom of peasants and hoboes.

He served during the war as a medic in Greenland. In 1946 he arrived in Paris to study at the Sorbonne on the G.I. Bill. He was living in a dumpy Left Bank hotel, where he soon accumulated a substantial lending library using his G.I. book vouchers and those he cadged from less literary-minded compatriots. Ferlinghetti told me about the time he first met George: “He was in a tiny room, about 10 feet square, with books piled up to the ceiling on three walls, sitting in a broken-down easy chair cooking his lunch over a can of Sterno.” (“His cooking never got much above the Sterno level,” Ferlinghetti added.) George was not only lending but also selling books—“at outrageous prices,” Ferlinghetti grumbled, sounding as if he were still smarting over an allegedly overpriced collection of Proust he bought from George during the Truman administration. With money saved from such sales, along with a small inheritance and fees from English lessons, George eventually moved the enterprise to its current spot, at 37 Rue de la Bûcherie, in a space previously occupied by an Algerian grocery. “I hope, finally, to have a niche where I can safely look upon the world’s horror and beauty,” he wrote in a letter to his parents.

The shop’s original name was Le Mistral. That was in honor, George would say at various times, of the southern French winds, or a Chilean poet he admired, or “the first girl I ever fell in love with.” It wasn’t until 1964, on the occasion of William Shakespeare’s 400th birthday, and two years after Beach’s death, that Whitman took the name of Shakespeare and Company. Beach, who knew Whitman and frequented his store in her later years, may or may not have given him her explicit blessing to carry the mantle forward. (One has to bear with a certain level of imprecision in most matters George-related.)

Robert Stone sketches a grubby portrait of the store at the start of its second decade. “It was in a pretty tough part of town,” he told me. “The neighborhood was basically an ethnic slum.” Shakespeare’s building, he said, “was quite medieval. There was hardly anything you could call plumbing. If you wanted to bathe, which you did from time to time, the nearest available sanitary facilities were over at the public baths on the Île de la Cité”—a five-minute walk away. But the greatest challenge of living at the store, in Stone’s view, was that “you couldn’t really count on there being a place for you to sleep on any given night, because George might get the notion to kick you out just to provide lodgings to a street person, in which case you were out of luck.”

Despite the neighborhood and perhaps despite himself, George had a decent business on his hands. “The store was always full of people,” Ferlinghetti said. “There was a steady line. It was a while before he got in the tourist guidebooks, but right from the beginning he made a lot of money.” One of the store’s early flyers boasted of a fairly tony clientele, with capriciously capitalized endorsements from Max Ernst (“Continues the Tradition of the Paris book-salon”) and Preston Sturges (“A Very Friendly & hospitable bookshop”). Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Jacques Chirac were later customers.

But being a Communist as well as an anarchist (is that self-canceling?), George often ran the store less as a business than as a social laboratory, habitually asking strangers to take over the till while he ran an errand or went off to read a book. Sometimes he trusted them; sometimes he didn’t but was curious to see what would happen. “I’m sure thousands and thousands of francs and euros have walked out of that shop,” Mary Duncan said. Valuable books, too. The poet Gregory Corso, in particular, was known to pilfer stock while in residence—and sometimes tried to sell stolen books back to George, who, if feeling indulgent, would go along with the charade. In the long run, you could argue, George’s trust exercises paid off: the archives are rife with letters of apology that originally had hard currency attached. Corso’s debt was repaid after a fashion, too, when, following George’s death, Sylvia and David found an unpublished manuscript of Corso poems and drawings shoved in among a bunch of moldering papers above the water tank in George’s bathroom.

As Robert Stone had discovered, George’s generosity could be a double-edged sword—hospitality as a kind of test. At one point, he was in the habit of greeting guests with wine, but in old tuna tins rather than glasses. Anaïs Nin refused to drink hers. So too did Maria Callas, who was so nakedly revolted that George dismissed her as fatally bourgeois. Years later he tossed Johnny Depp out of his upstairs room after the actor politely refused his offer of a bed for the evening. (This story needs context in that George, indifferent to popular culture, likely had no idea who Depp was.) A model received an unpleasant surprise when George, as was his habit, turned on the gas main that used to run into the wishing well and tossed in a match without warning anyone—in a bookstore in a 17th-century building!—just to get a reaction. As Sylvia recounted it, “I met this woman years later in New York. She said”—iciest of tones—“ ‘Oh. Your father burnt all my hair.’ ” The woman also told Sylvia that she had been a hair model.

Sylvia’s parents met at the bookstore in the late 1970s. Her mother was a painter from England. The couple married—George’s one and only stab at the institution. He was 67 when Sylvia was born in 1981.

In many ways, Shakespeare and Company was a magical place to grow up. In a short history of the store Sylvia wrote several years ago, she recalls following George as he made his early-morning rounds, “rattling his huge set of Quasimodo keys, singing to the Tumbleweeds to wake up, ‘Rise and shine, the bells are ringing . . . ’ We picked our way across sleeping bodies covering almost every inch of the floor, and occasionally he would shout at someone, ‘What are you, a lunatic?’ then turn around and wink at me.”

George’s parenting, like his till keeping, could be—a gentle phrase—laissez-faire. Sylvia told me that years later, after she had taken over the store, “these two gentlemen came and asked, ‘Is Sylvia still alive?’ And I said, ‘No, Sylvia Beach died in 1962.’ And they said, ‘No, we mean Sylvia, George’s daughter.’ And I said, ‘Oh! Well, I’m her.’ It turned out one day I had been in a mood, squalling around the store, and George couldn’t stand it anymore. These two young backpackers walked in, and he handed me to them and said, ‘Here! Take her for an hour—and I’ll give you each three books.’ They took me to the park to play, I think, and I guess they had been concerned about my future ever since.”

Simply living at the store “was pretty mad,” Sylvia said—especially, one imagines, for a young family. “There were never any closed doors. George shared everything. There was no privacy whatsoever.” Any given morning, the front room in the upstairs apartment might be “carpeted with Scandinavian hippies,” as Ferlinghetti put it. He told me he once tried to convince George to buy a real home somewhere away from Shakespeare’s: “Well, he would have none of it. He was saving every penny to buy another room or another floor for the store. That’s all he wanted to do.”

Sylvia’s mother left Paris and took her daughter to Norfolk, England, in the late 1980s, when Sylvia was six or seven. There were trans-Channel visits for birthdays and summer holidays, but they stopped altogether when she went away to boarding school in Scotland. Father and daughter would have almost no contact for five or six years. “He’s not someone—in any way, a modern person—where he’d pick up the phone,” she told an interviewer several years ago. “I think he thought about me, and every now and then he sent me a letter…. We just kind of lost touch.”

As George rounded into his 80s, his friends began to worry about his and the bookshop’s twinned futures. “There seemed to be a lot of people buzzing around, like harpies ready to pounce and pick over his store,” Ferlinghetti told me. At one point, he and George’s brother, Carl, who flew in from Florida, tried to persuade George to set up a foundation to carry the store forward, as Ferlinghetti had done with City Lights, but George brushed them off.

He wasn’t altogether blinkered on the subject. Around 1998, when he would have been 85, he sent a “memorandum” to George Soros, the rare capitalist he admired, asking Soros to “please accept the bookstore as a gift—unconditional, unencumbered, unrestricted in any way.” If Soros responded, the answer was presumably no. Otherwise, George Whitman carried on as he always had. In an interview for the forthcoming store history, Joanna Anderson, a former Tumbleweed, recalled him getting on a ladder in the early 1990s to fix the store’s Edison-era electrical wiring: “I remember the fizzing sound as he electrocuted himself and fell off the ladder. As I helped him to his feet, duly alarmed, he batted me away belligerently: ‘I’m fine. It’s good for you.’ ” Maybe it was; a man in his eighth decade might well know.

The absent Sylvia was Shakespeare’s obvious savior. When she had been living at the shop, “when I was still 4, 5, 6,” she said, George would tell her she would take over the store when she turned 21 and “how wonderful that would be, how I would absolutely love it. That was just kind of a fact for him.” For her, as she grew older, it was an assumption that grated. But it was a hope he continued to express in sidelong fashion during their years apart. In 1991 he published a pamphlet about the store and fancifully—wishfully?—listed her as the author. She was 10.

There are developmental advantages for a child in not having been raised by an eccentric Communist bookshop owner. As Sylvia later told an interviewer, “I would have been crazy if I’d grown up [at the store]. I’d be on drugs.” And yet, as most children with an absent parent do, Sylvia found herself increasingly curious about her father. She realized, too, around the time she entered University College London, that, if she wanted to re-establish a relationship with him, time was of the essence, the health benefits of high voltage notwithstanding. A first attempt misfired when, on the spur of the moment during a visit to Paris, she popped into the store unannounced and he treated her brusquely. But with a single-mindedness he might have recognized, she tried again in 2000, when she was 19, sending a letter to pave the way and bringing along a friend for support. This time he was prepared, in his fashion, introducing her to everyone at the shop as “Emily, an actress from London,” a game she put up with for several days until she finally called him on it. He just laughed. Ticked off at the time, she would come to realize the charade was his way of creating intimacy between them on the bookstore’s public stage. No one had really been fooled, however, given that Sylvia was an obvious college-age match for the little girl whose picture was plastered on walls throughout the store and George’s apartment.

Sylvia spent the summer of 2001 at the store and visited again the following year, planning to stay for only a second summer—not 12 years and counting. I asked if there was some dramatic, sword-in-the-stone moment when she earned or chose to shoulder her patrimony, maybe accompanied by tears or thunderclaps. Alas, no, although at one point, during a particularly rough patch with her father early on, when she was thinking of throwing in the towel and returning to London, she came across a box of unsent letters he’d written while she was in boarding school. “It was obviously so moving to come across these and so sad—and so frustrating that he didn’t actually send them. But they confirmed for me that I should stay. I realized that he’s not, you know—that he did actually have a lot of feelings, but he was just unable to kind of show them.”

Ultimately, she said, the process of deciding to stay, and of George ceding control, was “organic.” What happened, she said, is that “little by little I fell in love with it, and with working in it,” and because George and the bookstore were more or less one and the same, as she now understood, “I managed to get closer and closer to him.” There was something else too, she added, almost as an afterthought: “I think I could tell he needed somebody.”

“Organic” isn’t the same thing as “smooth.” Sylvia pushed to make changes. George called her Margaret Thatcher and pushed back. She introduced the radical innovations not only of telephone but also of MasterCard and Visa. (Previously, George had trusted credit cards only as tools for jimmying locked doors.) She added a computer. (George had been ordering from English and American publishers by international post.) She brought in a proper “admin” person. (One old ledger she found had a 31-day February.) There were blowups on the bookshop floor. “He would get really angry and go in a fit for like four minutes,” David told me. “And then Syl would go, ‘Oh, I love you, Daddy,’ and jump around, and he would just kind of melt.”

“It was difficult for him to let go, and yet he wanted to let go,” Sylvia said. “I mean, it’s like that in any kind of family business with different generations. But I think what we really went head-to-head on, what he was really worried about, was the aesthetics of the bookshop. And it’s true—I had some really bad ideas in my 20s! Sometimes he would grab me and say, ‘You’ve moved the Russian section! This is crazy!’ He’d drag me over and say, ‘Do you not understand why I had the Russian section here?’ And I’d be like, ‘Well, no. I moved it over there. It’s fine.’ He’d be like, ‘No! The Russian section has to be here because this nook is so romantic. And then you have gaps between the shelves so you can see and fall in love with a customer on the other side while you’re reading Dostoyevsky.’ And I was like, ‘Oh god, you’ve really planned out every corner.’ ”

Once she understood that, Sylvia and George achieved détente, though, as Mary Duncan noted, “I’m not sure he ever stopped voicing his opinion. He was probably voicing his opinion on his deathbed.” On December 31, 2005, he formally signed the store over to her—though that was only the type of legal nicety he’d long held in contempt (much to the dismay of French bureaucrats). Two years earlier, on January 1, 2004, he had authored a more revealing transfer of title, which he then painted on the store’s solid wood shutters—or, as he called them, the Paris Wall Newspaper, which he had used for proclamations and want ads over the years. He wrote, in part (the words are still there, facing Notre Dame):

INSTEAD OF BEING A BONAFIDE BOOKSELLER I AM MORE LIKE A FRUSTRATED NOVELIST. THIS STORE HAS ROOMS LIKE CHAPTERS IN A NOVEL AND THE FACT IS TOLSTOI AND DOSTOYEVSKY ARE MORE REAL TO ME THAN MY NEXT DOOR NEIGHBORS…. IN THE YEAR 1600, OUR WHOLE BUILDING WAS A MONASTERY CALLED ‘LA MAISON DU MUSTIER.’ IN MEDIEVAL TIMES EACH MONASTERY HAD A FRERE LAMPIER WHOSE DUTY WAS TO LIGHT THE LAMPS AT NIGHTFALL. I HAVE BEEN DOING THIS FOR FIFTY YEARS NOW IT IS MY DAUGHTER’S TURN. GW

George would live for nearly eight more years. Increasingly frail, he was largely confined to his room for the last several years of his life, though he continued to make appearances at the store, a spectral presence hovering on the edge of things, sometimes just a face and a wild halo of white hair poking out of a fourth-floor window. He was rumored still to hurl books from that height if displeased by the quality of a reading down below.

I would like to editorialize here and say that Shakespeare and Company remains a singular place, and that Sylvia and David have done a remarkable job of preserving the store’s DNA while modernizing around the edges and adding revitalizing touches of their own, such as an irregular series of literary and arts festivals, a 10,000-euro prize for unpublished writers (financed in part by friends of the store), and a vital, ongoing series of readings, panels, plays, and other events, including an annual summer reading series with N.Y.U.’s Writers in Paris program. A publishing venture is in the works, to be launched with the aforementioned store history, as is a Shakespeare and Company café, a longtime dream of George’s, possibly in a commercial space around the corner the store is buying. (His other longtime dream, of stocking the wishing well with baby seals, has been abandoned for now.) A new Web site will be rolled out this fall, and the paid staff—who now number 22, up from 7 when George died—have some witty ideas about curation and customizing books as a way to compete, on Shakespeare’s terms, with Amazon.

“I know people don’t like to hear this kind of thing,” Ethan Hawke wrote in an e-mail, “but in the years that I have been visiting the store (since 1986), it has only been improving.” He is not alone in that belief.

Perhaps most important, Shakespeare and Company remains an incubator—to employ the current term of art. Sylvia has tamed the Tumbleweed program from the Lord of the Flies-like excesses (her analogy) of George’s later years, when he was less adept at screening out bad eggs and unrepentant moochers. One morning, the current crop of Tumbleweeds and I shared a pancake breakfast, a Shakespeare and Company tradition, in George’s old apartment. (George, wasting not, would use leftover batter to glue down stray bits of carpeting or wallpaper.) The Tumbleweeds were everything you’d want in a group of young, aspiring writers: earnest, funny, cosmopolitan, curious, self-conscious, goofy, passionate. And, unlike most denizens of the New York literary world, they still argue about books, not just what’s on Netflix.

One afternoon when I was lurking in the shop and some Tumbleweeds were going about their tasks, four books abruptly flew off an upper shelf of their own volition, it seemed. (Appropriately, they were editions of Nin’s Henry and June.) “That happens from time to time,” observed Milly Unwin, one of the store’s full-time employees. “We like to say it’s George’s ghost, throwing books at us.” A joke, of course, though if anyone were to stick around his earthly haunts as a poltergeist, it might well be George, who still has tricks up his sleeve. While sifting through his papers, Krista Halverson found Dick Cheney’s business card, from his stint during the 90s at Halliburton. Did Cheney visit the store at some point? Was he looking to buy some Hemingway or Ginsberg or Tom Clancy? Did Sinatra refer him? Cheney didn’t respond to a query, and no one in Paris knows.

An earlier version of this article misidentified the nationality of David Delannet's father. He is French.