Shakespeare & Compañy. París

"Some people call me de Don Quixote of the Latin Quarter because my head is so far up in the clouds that i can imagine all of us are angels in paradise. And instead of beaing a bonafide bookseller i am more like a fustrated novelist store has rooms like chapters in a novel. And the fact is that Tolstoi and Doestoyevski are more real to me than my next door neighbors.And even stranger is the fact that even before I was born Doestoyesvski wrote the story of my life in a book called "the Idiot" and ever since reading it I have been searching for the heorine. A girl called Nastasia Filipovna. One hundred years ago my bookstore was a wine shop hidden from the Seine by an annex of the hotel Dieu Hospital which since has been demolished & replaced by a garden.And further back in the year 1600 our whole biulding was a monastery. Had a frere lampier whose duty was to light the lamps at nightfall. I have been doing this for fifty years, no is my daughters turn."
George Whitman. Shakespeare & Company. París.