Clodagh Finn: We must help bookshops weather Covid storm

Legendary bookshop Shakespeare and Company in Paris hit hard times during the pandemic. Picture: AP Photo/Michel Euler

How I miss bookshops and everything about them. The browsing, the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, the heady smell of paper. There’s certainly a case to be made to have them classified as essential businesses, even in these Covid-challenged times. To borrow a phrase from Liverpool manager Jürgen Klopp, they are the most important of the least important things.

They are always the first places I seek out whenever I visit a new town or city. They help me find my bearings, a sort of zero-mile marker from which to measure all forays to the shops. Perhaps that’s why news of hard times at Shakespeare and Company, the world-famous bookshop which is a stone’s throw from the real ‘kilometre zero’ in central Paris, struck a particular chord.

Like so many others, I made a beeline for the legendary bookshop with its creaking staircases and warren of airless, book-lined rooms when I first visited Paris many years ago. All the guidebooks spoke of its eccentric owner George Whitman, who offered a sanctuary to ‘tumbleweeds’ — ie, travellers, aspiring writers, dreamers and drifters — passing through his always-open door.

The appeal of the place was magnetic. It was the spiritual successor to the original shop run by American bookseller Sylvia Beach, who published James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, when no one else dared. There is a wonderful photo of Joyce, with bow-tie and cane, standing with Beach in the doorway of a shop that acted as a gathering place for the likes of Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F Scott Fitzgerald and TS Eliot.

A signed first edition of Ulysses by James Joyce. Shakespeare and Company owner Sylvia Beach published the novel in 1922 when no one else dared.

The more recent incarnation, set up in 1951 by fellow American George Whitman, also had the feel of a literary Utopia, with its own long list of visiting luminaries: Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Martin Amis and Zadie Smith to mention a few. The difference, though, was that everyone could have a go. Whitman welcomed all kinds of strays and aspirants — including me — to a shop that has built up a huge fan base over the decades.

Little wonder, then, that its plea for help prompted a response so overwhelming that the shop, which is now run by George’s daughter, Sylvia, had to temporarily close its online service to cope with the surge in orders.

If ever a reaction was justified it was this one because Shakespeare and Company is the living epitome of its motto: “Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise”. But not in any cutesy or twee way.

When I first pitched up there in my early 20s, hoping to get some sort of a job, I remember being terrified of George Whitman, a man who might just say anything. 

Writers were offered a bed in return for a few hours’ work but all kinds of hangers-on were buzzing around too, hoping to latch on to the coat-tails of something that was very special.

I remember rehearsing my ‘application’ speech before approaching the owner, who was torso-deep in a bookshelf with only his shirt tail poking out. I was a cub reporter, had had some theatre reviews published in national newspapers and I had just edited a directory of Irish pig producers. I spluttered out some combination of same — half of it to his back — when he turned around, fixed me with his pale, twinkling eyes and I knew in that moment I was in. (It must have been the pig directory).

To be ‘in’ meant that you could join in the life and deliciously chaotic times of possibly the most famous independent bookshop in the world. It meant being invited to take tea upstairs and serving it up to visitors in jam jars, or helping out downstairs, staining the bookshelves with cold tea, which proved to be surprisingly effective.

There was a storybook quality to the shop itself, rather than just its contents, and that was entirely deliberate. As Whitman himself described it: “I created this bookstore like a man would write a novel, building each room like a chapter, and I like people to open the door the way they open a book, a book that leads into a magic world in their imaginations.”

It was like that. If you opened a door or ventured up a crooked (and very unstable staircase), you never knew what you would find. You could chance across one of the visiting writers packing up their make-shift bed among the bookshelves. All those who stayed were asked to write a short biography and one of my jobs was to type these on a portable typewriter perched on my knees.

It was a fascinating and infuriating task because every time I returned, the results of the previous week’s typing had been mislaid or scrunched up with piles of other loose papers. (I was a weekly visitor because the hard cash had to be earned in my paying job, making frites at Burger King. The glamour of Parisian life.)

A window display at Shakespeare and Company: Some 30,000 or so writers are said to have stayed at this remarkable place. Picture: Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images

It cheered me no end, then, to read this description from Krista Halverson, Shakespeare’s archivist and editor of the bookshop’s history (Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart): “With every piece of paper you picked up, there could be no assumption of what it would be. I found a résumé of someone who just wanted to work at the bookstore, from maybe 1976, stuck to a letter from Anaïs Nin – stuck to it with a dead cockroach.”

That sounds just about right.

Some 30,000 or so writers are said to have stayed at this remarkable place, opposite Notre Dame, and it’s heart-lifting to see that so many of them — and many more besides — rallied to answer its call for support earlier this month. Former French prime minister François Hollande was among them.

Indeed, France, like Britain, ran a campaign to have bookshops considered essential retailers. Even though it was unsuccessful, a few bookshops stayed open and the mayor of Cannes made a point of buying books in one of them.

Hard Times...

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Read it here: https://t.co/alKvFkPLHC pic.twitter.com/a7Q13U8KGu

— Shakespeare&Company (@Shakespeare_Co) October 28, 2020

That is not to suggest bookshops anywhere should flout the public-health guidelines; just to say that the interests of our booksellers, and in particular all the wonderful independent ones, have been somewhat overshadowed by those warning of the devastating impact of Covid on other more vocal sectors.

While Shakespeare and Co may be safe for now, many others won’t be able to ride out the challenges posed by the pandemic. 

Bookshops here have made gallant efforts to continue to get books to the reading public

Over the last number of months, we have seen, time and again, how people can come together to save something they hold dear.

They have clicked and collected, bought online, phoned through orders and, hopefully, those sales will be enough to ensure that all of our bookshops reopen when level 5 restrictions finally ease.

It might be too late to start a campaign to have bookshops classified as essential retailers, but it’s still not too late to give them our essential business.