Time Was Soft There A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. Jeremy Mercer St. Martin’s Press ISBN 0-312-34739-1 hardcover, 272 pages $32 (CDN)

A small number of bookstores have entered legend, becoming the destination of pilgrimages by those who live and breathe books. There’s the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, Powell’s Books in Portland; Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights in San Francisco; the Gotham Book Mart in New York City; London, England has the famous Foyles; and in a category of its own: Shakespeare & Company, in the heart of Paris.

I’ll declare my bias here (“Again?” sigh those who know me): I stayed at Shakespeare & Company during my first trip to France in 1980, and it left an indelible impression on me. I wrote a bit about my time there on my website, but George Whitman’s store has long deserved a more complete treatment. Which is why I was so pleased to read Jeremy Mercer’s new book Time Was Soft There (subtitled “A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co”).

In 1999 Mercer was a young crime reporter for the Ottawa Citizen, with a couple of true crime books under his belt. All this coverage drew unwanted attention to one of his contacts, resulting in a strongly-worded threat to Mercer himself. He fled Canada for Paris where he lived a low-profile existence, eking out his savings in cheap hotels. But one cold day his fortunes changed when (to quote from the book’s dustjacket):

he found himself invited to a tea party among the riffraff of the timeless Left Bank fantasy known as Shakespeare & Co. In its present incarnation, Shakespeare & Co. has become a destination for writers and readers the world over, trying to reclaim the lost world of literary Paris in the 1920s. Having been inspired by Sylvia Beach’s original store, the present owner, George Whitman, invites writers who are down and out in Paris to live and dream amid the bookshelves in return for work. Jeremy Mercer tumbled into this literary rabbit hole, found a life of camaraderie with the other eccentric residents, and became, for a time, George Whitman’s confidant and right-hand man.

George Whitman, the New Jersey-born owner of the current Shakespeare & Company, is one of those unforgettable characters who stand well apart from the crowd; a self-proclaimed socialist, mercurial, irascible, quite capable of being hard-nosed and soft-hearted simultaneously. George’s fabled bookstore across from Notre Dame was founded in 1951, which means that he has kept it going for over 50 years (despite a total lack of business acumen). Stepping through the doors of Shakespeare & Company is like stepping into a fictional world, and those fortunate enough to be invited to stay there will never forget the experience. Mercer does an excellent job of capturing George Whitman in all his contradictions and complexities, and the portrait contained in Time Was Soft There is one born from a genuine affection. The book contains by far the most detailed information I’ve seen on George Whitman’s background, although it does not pretend to be his biography.

What was so pleasing — and comforting — about Time Was Soft There was the discovery that so little at Shakespeare & Company has changed; all of us wish that the things we love could remain just as we first found them. Twenty years separated Mercer’s time as a “tumbleweed” from my own days at the bookstore, but reading his account was like living through that entire magical interlude again.

Mercer captures the sense of wonder one feels waking up that first morning in a bookstore in Paris, realizing that it has not been a dream:

The instant my eyes opened, everything felt sharp and clear, as if I’d finished a wind sprint or stepped from a frothing sea. I’d always been one to play with snooze buttons, lolling in bed and rationalizing being ten, twenty, thirty minutes late for work or school. But that first morning at the bookstore, there were no slow degrees of consciousness or seductive fingers of sleep. I was alive.

I remember it all so well. Everything is there: the petty rivalries; the formation of lifetime friendships; the many rituals adopted as the “tumbleweeds” adapt to the quirky requirements of bookstore residency: writing their biography, reading a book a day, and helping out with the constant cleaning chores. The characters Mercer meets — Simon, the British poet-in-residence; Kurt, the young American perpetually polishing his screenplay; the surly “Gaucho”; Luke; Pia; Scott; Sophie; Nadia — are, apart from their names, almost indistinguishable from their many predecessors, that 50-year parade of short- and long-term guests of the unforgettable, irreplaceable “Tumbleweed Hotel.”

According to George Whitman, forty thousand people have slept at Shakespeare & Company since its founding. Many of these “tumbleweeds” were writers, making it all the more surprising that no firsthand account of the bookstore has been published before this one. No matter: every story worth telling will eventually be told, and this story has finally had a proper telling.

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Jeremy Mercer is nearing the end of his self-constructed book tour of North America in support of Time Was Soft There. The picture above was taken at his reading in Vancouver. You can read about the book tour on Jeremy’s blog here; a list of Jeremy’s top 10 bookstores was recently published in The Guardian.