Paris and Shakespeare & Co.

I knew a man once who spoke well of Shakespeare & Co. and he said that it was in Paris. On a totally different mission we had to go to this city and there with the encouragement of the spring's sunshine, under the Cherry blossom, people were massing outside this iconic shop of books. Cathedral de Notre-Dame may have been on the island opposite, but the 'pull' of that structure could not compare to the pull and lure of books.

Outside even the books had to be checked out with a copy of Charley's Aunt demanding to be picked up. There were others there and we did buy 'The Drop' by Dennis Lehane who should be at The Harrogate Crime Writer's Festival in July. We had to go in, of course!

Inside it is a brush with the past. Narrow gaps in walls of hewn stone and there with the packed shelves stuffed full of words bound in books that have been hewn out of and from the minds and the imagination of many others. Cramped, jostling shoulder to rump with browsers, and girls leaving notes on a board for such things. Then Shakespeare's cat brushed past in a lazily fashion and possibly looking for a hand to caress.

Still inside the following books beckoned to Michelle and were purchased:

Easy Motion Tourist by Leye Adenle and he is due to visit Harrogate too and maybe we will book him for the Murder Mystery Dinner. We are twice winners, you know!

Ernest Hemingway For Whom The Bell Tolls was bought to increase our knowledge of the Spanish Civil War.

Cara Black for her crime novel Murder in Belleville which according to the marketing blurb is a winning mystery, and it says, stylish and sexy and set in Paris. So there another one to add to a Warsaw Mystery bought in Poland a few of weeks ago.

It is good how things go around and around for for up on the wall the name Sylvia Beach leapt out to me. She had the ridiculous idea to open a café with books. Then she had the outrageous idea of publishing Ulysses. How daft can anyone be? Publish a banned book from a writer like Joyce must have taken courage and womanly guts. Then there was the book all about the history of it and it too had to be bought. A spend of 95€ with the bag to show off that we had been to an independent book shop. We may go again. Oh yes. We are here to watch my daughter, her husband and thousands of others to complete 26.2 miles. I think that we will watch with a coffee or two and shout our encouragement.

Written in part just down the slope from a certain big arch and outside L'Etoile 1903 on Avenue de la Wagram and the sun is shining.