Bed and books-feast at Shakespeare and Co.

In the early 1990s I was hitch-hiking around the Sahara Desert in Morocco with two American tourists on old red Bedford lorries which drove from village to village for market days, carrying everything from sheep and oranges to Berbers and stray tourists. When we headed back to Europe it was via Madrid first for a few weeks, then Paris, where for one or two nights we managed to stay at the Shakespeare and Co. Bookshop. I wasn’t aware of the famous Left Bank bookshop at the time, but my American companions had heard they offered weary tourists and writers a bed, well, in our case, a sofa, for the night (which it still does to this day in a more formal manner, with its Tumbleweed programme for unpublished writers). 

There were all kinds of interesting people hanging around and living in the bookshop; we heard of a writer in the attic who’d been working on his novel for years. We went out with a bunch of them to a bar in the evening, there was an American cinematographer, an opera singer, various writers and us three travellers. 

I slept on a sofa in a nook of the shop. I remember when all the lights went out in the bookshop: unable to sleep, I walked around the dark shop, running my hand over the spines and covers of books I couldn’t see the titles of in the dark. 

After Morocco I got into reading Paul Bowles, William Burroughs and Charles Bukowski, finding out later that the beat writers used to hang out at Shakespeare and Co, with Burroughs apparently researching parts of Naked Lunch in the shop. But the bookshop’s fame – or infamy – goes back to at least 1922 when it was the first shop brave enough to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses.

– Published in this month’s Bookmark, the newsletter for Oxfam bookshops (which I also design).

Previously on Barnflakes
Jardin Majorelle, Marrakesh
Flickagrams #9
Paul Bowles: Exile on Maghreb Street
Notes on Black Sparrow Press
The Stowaway
Casablanca

Elsewhere on Barnflakes
Gullible Travels