Shakespeare and Company and Films

Mourir auprès de toi is a short stop animation film by Spike Jonze, featuring the felt book cover characters created by Olympia Le Tan.

First of all I have to excuse myself for not posting anything on the blog in the last couple of months. My life has become a little less hectic now so I should be able to write here more often. For the time being, I want to share a short film I found via the The New Yorker‘s Book Bench. The film is related to the blog in more than one way. Directed by Spike Jonze, it was created in collaboration with Olympia Le-Tan, who made the book-clutches I mentioned a few months back. The film, called Mourir auprès de toi (To Die By Your Side) is also set in the famous Shakespeare and Company bookshop, in Paris, which I’ve also blogged about. It features Le-Tan’s stitched book covers coming to life at night after the bookshop has closed, and an unlikely love story between the characters on two of the covers… Watch it here! 

P.S. A few weeks ago, G. came across this perfume ad for Lancôme’s impossibly named Trésor Midnight Rose, featuring Emma Watson (aka Hermione Granger). The entire video is awful, by the way, but we’re pretty sure the bookshop at the beginning, where Watson meets her beau, buys a copy of a fictitious book called Midnight Rose, and loses her hat, is also Shakespeare and Company. 

Hipsters & Company

Shakespeare & Co — a perfect bookshop if there ever was one. Or is it?

Shakespeare and Company is certainly one of the most famous bookstores in the world. It was opened in 1919 by a young American Woman, Sylvia Beach, and eventually became a prominent place for the artistically minded American expats who were hanging out in Paris in the 1920s — people like Fitzgerald and Hemingway, coined “the lost generation” by Gertrude Stein. Beach also famously publishing James Joyce’s highly polemical Ulysses, now widely acknowledged to be one of the most influential novels of the 2oth century.

The original Shakespeare & Co closed in 1941, during the German occupation. The on which one can see and visit today, a stone’s throw from Notre-Dame, opened in 1951 under the name of Le Mistral. The owner, George Whitman, eventually changed the name to honour Beach’s store. Like the original Shakespeare & Co, the new one also became a kind of refuge for a community of edgy young American writers of the period — those who would become members of the Beat generation. Even today, the store — now managed by Whitman’s daughter, Sylvia (the name loops the loop rather perfectly) — apparently houses several budding writers who are there to read and write, provided they help out in the store for a couple of hours each day. There was an excellent article about the whole business in The Guardian a few years ago.

Disappointment was probably inevitable when I visited Shakespeare and Company myself at the beginning of the year. The place is too legendary and the literary references too great; how could a bookshop possibility live up to such a magical reputation? It does, in a way: the elegant, worn facade; the atmospheric maze of tiny rooms and cramped stairs; the clutter of typewriters and posters and people staring smartly at the shelves; and the books, of course — books, books everywhere, piles of them on the floor, on the tables, mountains of them climbing up to the ceiling and arching over the door frames, like a cluttered cave of paper. The problem is the people; Shakespeare and Co has become the ultimate hipster tourist destination in Paris. Forget spending a comfortable half hour in the reading room crammed with used books (for consultation only) upstairs; the incessant come and go of ogling, carefully outfitted twenty-somethings is much too irritating.

Inside the worn, book-filled interior of Shakespeare & Co

I wanted to be charmed by the bookshop and unfortunately I came out mainly disappointed, and then frustrated by my disappointment. The only comfort, I suppose, is that I was myself part of the ogling, whispering crowd. I was as much an annoying voyeur as they were, as much of a hipster looking for a culture fix, even if I think I deserved it more than they do! I even bought the Shakespeare & Co tote… Although I didn’t stay very long in the bookshop, from what I saw they had a good selection of new books and interesting staff picks. I also came out with a copy Lewis Buzbee’s The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, which, being about bookshops, mentions Shakespeare and Co quite a lot. It was a fitting purchase.

In the end, the time spent browsing the green stands of the bouquinistes on the banks of the Seine nearby, where I found a yellowed NRF edition of Saint Exupéry’s Terre des Hommes, turned out to be an altogether more pleasing — and parisian — experience.

The famous bouquinistes, on the banks of the Seine.

The Travelling Library

The ultimate travelling library: "Archive II", designed by David Garcia, which allows you to walk away with half a ton of books!

The most important part of preparing any trip — be it a weekend at the cottage or a longer stay abroad — is most certainly packing your bags. However, I’ve found that one specific aspect of packing often takes up a lot more of my thoughts and time than it should: deciding what books I’m going to bring along with me. I always take along at least two books, no matter how long the trip, to make sure I have a backup if I finish or get tired of the first one. If travelling involves flying, I find that complicates the decision-making; I always want to bring something really long I’ve been meaning to get to for a while because I tell myself that a flight will give me several solid hours with no interruptions and nothing better to do, although of course I should bring something lighter and really engaging because airplanes are so uncomfortable. I always end up bringing loads of books with me on planes and read only very little — I tend to switch to the little screen rather quickly.

Of course, reading is enjoyable at home, but there’s a very vivid satisfaction in sitting in a park or a café abroad and doing something so usual, so normal. It’s a good way to escape the eery feeling of displacement that travelling gives me, and slip into that very moment, enter the texture of life in the place where I am a stranger. I have very fond memories of visiting a lot of truly fascinating places in Ireland when I went backpacking there for a month in 2008, but I also remember — with equal fondness — reading DeNiro’s Game on a bench in the gardens of Saint-Patrick’s Cathedral, or José Saramago’s The Cave in a hostel common room on a rainy day.

Reading Dostoyevsky with a nice, cold beer in Sofia, Bulgaria.

I’ve found it’s really important not to bring something too engrossing to read on a trip, however, or else all I want to do is read and skip all the sightseeing and experiences the place has to offer. On another backpacking trip two years ago, in Turkey and the Balkans, I brought One Hundred Years of Solitude, The Brothers Karamazov, Voyage jusqu’au bout de la nuit, and other stuff I’d wanted to read for a long time. These proved perfect: good to escape elsewhere in long, hot bus rides, but not exactly thrillers. My girlfriend and I learned this truth the hard way when she brought The Shadow of the Wind on the same trip; she mostly wanted to stay by the hotel pool for the (very short) time it took her to read it. I ended up bringing way too many books on that particular trip myself, some of which I didn’t even get around to reading (Le Rouge et le noir, if you really want to know, which still stares at me accusingly from my shelf, as yet unread). All those books did serve a purpose when my backpack was searched in the night train on the border between Bulgaria and Serbia. “Books! Books! BOOKS!” cried the customs officer as she shuffled through my backpack, pulling out volume after volume. She sighed rather desperately and gave up her search. If ever you need to pass anything illegal through Eastern-European borders, now you know how.

My "to read" pile.

I know what you’re thinking: an e-reader would solve that problem, and I could carry an entire library with me in the volume of a single, paperback novella. But the thing is, the love I have for ink and paper books still outweighs the advantages of those clever little machines. I like how I can annotate my books, I like turning the bottom corner of pages I want to read to G., and I like being able to measure how much I have left to read by the space between my thumb and index. I also have a tendency to buy books abroad, where they become mementos of the places I visit. Downloading them abroad just wouldn’t be the same. For example, I cherish my Everyman edition of Ulysses all the more because I bought it in Dublin, from the James Joyce Center. Similarly, I needed to get something — anything — from Shakespeare & Company, in Paris, the first time I went there a few months ago (I finally settled on a book about bookstores, The Yellow-Lighted Bookstore, by Lewis Buzbee, which I felt was appropriate). I didn’t see many decent books in English in the Balkans, although I did find a nice edition of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms in English, with an introduction in Bulgarian, in a street market in Sofia. My foreign book buying activities have gotten a little problematic in the last year, since I’ve been studying abroad in England and, although I brought a decent number of books along with me, I’ve also been buying lots of books here, because I like to surround myself with books — it gives me comfort and makes wherever I live feel like home. The problem is, come June, I need to bring all these books with me back to Montreal.

The nature of residence rooms means bookshelves also holds crockery and wine glasses. It adds to the charm, I suppose.

The core of my library-away-from-home is made up of the books I brought with me (The Measure of Paris, by Stephen Scobie, Possession by A. S. Byatt, and others), then there are books I needed to buy for school (Henry James and Shakespeare figure prominently here), and finally all the books I bought here: The Granta Book of Irish Short Stories, Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, Al Alvarez’s Risky Business, Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita bought at Mr B’s Book Emporium, in Bath), Diana Athill’s Instead of a Letter (bought in the London Review bookstore), and (too) many others. Some of these I’ve read, some I haven’t. In my defense, I’ve promised to stop buying books while I’m here — if only because of the logistical problem of bringing them back home with me — at least until I’ve read all of those I have.

Meanwhile, I have another problem; it’s Easter vacation and I’m leaving for a short trip to Italy this week… which books, I wonder, will get the chance to visit Florence with me?