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PARIS — George Whitman, the American-born owner of Shakespeare & Company, a fabled English-language bookstore on the Left Bank in Paris and a magnet for writers, poets and tourists for close to 60 years, died on Wednesday in his apartment above the store. He was 98.

He had not recovered from a stroke he suffered two months ago, his daughter, Sylvia, said in announcing his death.

More than a distributor of books, Mr. Whitman saw himself as patron of a literary haven, above all in the lean years after World War II, and the heir to Sylvia Beach, the founder of the original Shakespeare & Company, the celebrated haunt of Hemingway and James Joyce.

As Mr. Whitman put it, “I wanted a bookstore because the book business is the business of life.”

Overlooking the Seine and facing the Cathedral of Notre-Dame, the store, looking somewhat beat-up behind a Dickensian facade and spread over three floors, has been an offbeat mix of open house and literary commune. For decades Mr. Whitman provided food and makeshift beds to young aspiring novelists or writing nomads, often letting them spend a night, a week, or even months living among the crowded shelves and alcoves.

He welcomed visitors with large-print messages on the walls. “Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise,” was one, quoting Yeats. Next to a wishing well at the center of the store, a sign said: “Give what you can, take what you need. George.” By his own estimate, he lodged some 40,000 people.

Mr. Whitman’s store, founded in 1951, has also been a favorite stopover for established authors and poets to read from their work and sign their books. Its visitors list reads like a Who’s Who of American, English, French and Latin American literature: Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Samuel Beckett and James Baldwin were frequent callers in the early days; other regulars included Lawrence Durrell and the Beat writers William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso, all of them Mr. Whitman’s friends.

Another was the Beat poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti. The two met in Paris in the late 1940s and discussed the importance of free-thinking bookstores. Mr. Ferlinghetti went on to found what became a landmark bookshop in its own right, City Lights, in San Francisco. Their bookstores would be sister shops, the two men agreed.

Mr. Whitman’s beacon and enduring influence was Walt Whitman (no relation), who also ran a bookstore, more than a century ago. In a pamphlet, Mr. Whitman wrote that he felt a kinship with the poet. “Perhaps no man liked so many things and disliked so few as Walt Whitman,” he wrote, “and I at least aspire to the same modest attainment.”

George Whitman was born on Dec. 12, 1913, in East Orange, N.J., and grew up in Salem, Mass. His thirst for travel was awakened when his father, a physics teacher, took the family to China for a sabbatical year at Nanking University. After majoring in journalism at Boston University and graduating in 1935, Mr. Whitman began traveling in earnest, taking extended walking trips across North America and through Central America while writing and exploring, coming home only after getting bogged down in a swamp in Panama.

After enrolling at Harvard, he enlisted in the Army in 1941, serving as a medic for several months at an outpost in Greenland.

With the end of the war he resumed his travels, exploring Europe before settling in Paris in 1946. There he used his G.I. Bill benefits to start a small lending library in his windowless room in the Hotel de Suez near the Sorbonne, where he studied for a time.

After moving his English language books to a kiosk, he opened his store, first calling it Le Mistral. It was said to be named after the Chilean poet Gabriella Mistral, whose work Mr. Whitman admired.

Mr. Whitman, who had called himself a frustrated novelist, poured his energy into selling and lending books and moving in literary circles.

How Le Mistral became Shakespeare & Company has been a matter of some debate. Some accused Mr. Whitman of pilfering the name. But Clive Hart, a Joyce scholar, wrote in a recent e-mail that he attended a gathering in 1958 in which Sylvia Beach “announced that she would like to offer George the old name of Shakespeare & Company.”

“George was of course delighted,” Mr. Hart wrote.

Mr. Whitman adopted the name in 1964, to honor Ms. Beach on the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, the bookstore said. He named his daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman, born in 1981, after her.

Ms. Whitman, who now runs the store, is Mr. Whitman’s only child. She said that while he had many romantic attachments, he was married only once, and briefly, to her mother, Felicity Leng. He is also survived by a younger brother, Carl.

For all the romanticism surrounding the bookstore, Mr. Whitman went through difficult times. He was closed for a year, in 1967, for lack of a proper license, but with the support of friends he continued lending books and published the first issue of The Paris Magazine, which he called “the poor man’s Paris Review,” a reference to the literary journal founded in 1953 by George Plimpton and others. Mr. Whitman’s magazine carried work by Jean Paul Sartre, Lawrence Durrell, Allen Ginsberg and Marguerite Duras.

It has come out only sporadically since then. A fire once destroyed almost 5,000 volumes in the library above the store.

Mr. Whitman was famously frugal and expected the bibliophiles residing in his store to work a few hours every day sorting and selling books. Yet he also invited uncounted numbers of people for weekly tea parties to his own apartment, or for late-night readings enriched with dumplings or pots of Irish stew.

Some guests later described him as a kind and magnetic father figure to needy souls but also as a man who could throw tantrums and preside over the store’s residents, sometimes up to 20 people, like a moody and unpredictable dictator.

Mr. Whitman had variously called himself a communist, a utopian and a humanist. But he may have also been a romantic himself, at least concerning his life’s work. “I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly possessions — just a few old socks and love letters, “ he wrote in his last years. Paraphrasing a line from Yeats, he added, “and my little Rag and Bone Shop of the Heart.”

George Whitman, Paris Bookseller and Cultural Beacon, Is Dead at 98,
NYT,
14.12.2011,
https://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/15/
books/george-whitman-paris-bookseller-and-cultura

Mo. Man Burns Books

as Act of Protest

May 28, 2007

Filed at 5:26 a.m. ET

The New York Times

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

KANSAS CITY, Mo. (AP) -- Tom Wayne amassed thousands of books in a warehouse during the 10 years he has run his used book store, Prospero's Books. His collection ranges from best sellers like Tom Clancy's ''The Hunt for Red October'' and Tom Wolfe's ''Bonfire of the Vanities,'' to obscure titles like a bound report from the Fourth Pan-American Conference held in Buenos Aires in 1910, didn't sell. But wanting to thin out his collection, he found he couldn't even give away books to libraries or thrift shops, which said they were full. So on Sunday, Wayne began burning his books protest what he sees as society's diminishing support for the printed word.

''This is the funeral pyre for thought in America today,'' Wayne told spectators outside his bookstore as he lit the first batch of books.

The fire blazed for about 50 minutes before the Kansas City Fire Department put it out because Wayne didn't have a permit to burn them.

Wayne said next time he will get a permit. He said he envisions monthly bonfires until his supply -- estimated at 20,000 books -- is exhausted.

''After slogging through the tens of thousands of books we've slogged through and to accumulate that many and to have people turn you away when you take them somewhere, it's just kind of a knee-jerk reaction,'' he said. ''And it's a good excuse for fun.''

Wayne said he has seen fewer customers in recent years as people more often get their information from television or the Internet. He pointed to a 2002 study by the National Endowment for the Arts, that found that less than half of adult respondents reported reading for pleasure, down from almost 57 percent in 1982.

Kansas City has seen the number of used bookstores decline in recent years and there are few independent bookstores left in town, said Will Leathem, a co-owner of Prospero's Books.

''There are segments of this city where you go to an estate sale and find five TVs and three books,'' Leathem said.

Dozens of customers took advantage of the Sunday's book-burning, searching through those waiting to go into the fire for last-minute bargains.

Mike Bechtel paid $10 for a stack of books, including an antique collection of children's literature, which he said he'd save for his 4-year-old son.

''I think given the fact it is a protest of people not reading books, it's the best way to do it,'' Bechtel said. ''(Wayne has) made the point that not reading a book is as good as burning it.''

Mo. Man Burns Books as Act of Protest,
NYT,
28.5.2007,
http://www.nytimes.com/
aponline/us/AP-Book-Burning.html - broken link

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