The Thumbnail Book Reviews
by John Q McDonald --- 19 June 2006
by Jeremy Mercer
Just across the Seine from the cathedral of Notre Dame, there sits a literary landmark, the Shakespeare & Co. bookstore. Its name is legendary, but usually when one refers to the era of Sylvia Beach's original store, which figured in books by the likes of Ernest Hemingway, and which first published James Joyce's Ulysses. Beach closed her store during World War 2, and its name was taken over when another shop was opened by mercurial George Whitman. Whitman is at the center of life at the bookstore, and is in the center of this memoir of several months spent there at the turn of the millennium. Jeremy Mercer is a former reporter for an Ottawa newspaper who felt threatened enough after exposing a criminal's identity to flee to Paris. Once there, his money eventually runs out and he finds himself a refugee at Shakespeare & Co. Whitman is an ardent communist who believes strongly in the sharing of wealth. This isn't a recipe for a successful bookselling business, but it does make for an energetic and often bizarre arrangement at the store. Whitman makes the store into an almost free hostel for destitute writers and artists. Mercer becomes one of many thousands who have shacked up there over the decades. This book is his version of events during his time there. Mercer gets to know the residents of this historic bookshop but comes at the tale as a resident himself rather than as an outside watcher or reporter. That intimacy is what drives this memoir. Mercer wants to make a contribution, and is concerned for Whitman's advanced age and the uncertain future of Shakespeare & Co. as a literary institution. He hopes to ensure its survival by creating some kind of foundation to run the place when Whitman is gone, something like the arrangement that has preserved San Francisco's equally famous City Lights. Whitman is a difficult collaborator, though, and his mind changes with the weather. In the end, he hopes an individual close to him will take over the reins of the store while maintaining its communist sensibilities. Overall, the book is an enjoyable read. Mercer brings a wide-eyed amazement to his project, and the bookstore itself changes him, perhaps for the better. There is a kind of bouncy charm to the book. But, though Mercer does speak as an insider, the book does read as if written by a reporter rather than a diarist or literary author. It is a record, however, of a very peculiar institution that one hopes would survive in this age of homogenization.