That green storefront with the book bins out front is Shakespeare and Company, and across the water behind it stands Notre-Dame. A bookstore and a cathedral, staring at each other over the Seine. Of the two, the bookstore is the one you can sleep in.
I mean that literally. Since nineteen fifty-one, this shop has let travelers sleep for free among the shelves, on narrow beds that double as reading benches during the day. The deal has three conditions. You read a book a day. You help around the shop for a couple of hours. And before you leave, you write a one-page autobiography for the shop's archive. The guests are called tumbleweeds, and an estimated THIRTY THOUSAND of them have slept in this building. Somewhere upstairs sits an archive of thirty thousand one-page lives. Students, poets, runaways, and a respectable number of future novelists.
The man behind all this was George Whitman, an American who'd spent his younger years drifting around the world broke. He lived off the kindnes
s of people who owed him nothing. When he finally settled down and opened a bookstore in Paris, he decided to spend the rest of his life repaying that debt. He painted his policy above an inner doorway, and it's still there to read. Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.
George ran the place on his own terms. He described the shop as a socialist utopia masquerading as
