George Whitman

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George Whitman is the proprietor of the acclaimed Shakespeare and Co. bookstore in Paris, and was a contemporary of such Beat poets as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg. He sometimes poses as a grandson or grand-nephew of American poet Walt Whitman. He allows young travellers to stay in the residential quarters of his rue de la Bucherie premises, in exchange for two hours' work in the bookshop each day; you are also encouraged to read a book a day during your stay. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and although his exact age is generally undisclosed, his birthday is Dec 12th or 13th 1913^{[citation needed]}.

Whitman founded the bookstore in the 1950s, and named it after Sylvia Beach's earlier Paris bookstore "Shakespeare and Company". Whitman's store had a rocky history—he did not register or pay taxes for many years. Like many other artists in trouble with Internal Revenue, he was saved by André Malraux.

The present shop Shakespeare and Company at 37 rue de la Bûcherie in Paris, was opened in August 1951 (two years before sister bookshop City Lights was opened in San Francisco by Lawrence Ferlingetti) by George Whitman with an inheritance from his aunt. He called the shop "Le Mistral" after his first French girlfriend. From the very first night he allowed travellers, young writers, poets and artists to lodge in exchange with a hand in cleaning the shop. Sylvia Beach, whose famous shop was on 12 rue de l'Odéon, was still in Paris and came to Le Mistral to see the writers of the new generation, who Anais Nin called Xerox artists^{[citation needed]}, read aloud their new work. Whitman modeled his shop after Sylvia Beach's bookshop. As it was the only free english-language lending library in Paris, the Beats who arrived at the Beat Hotel on rue Git-le-Coeur quickly found their way to the small bookshop and made a place for themselves there. In 1962, Sylvia Beach died, willing to George Whitman a good deal of her private books and the rights to the name Shakespeare and Company. In 1964, Le Mistral was renamed Shakespeare and Company. Whitman named his daughter, born in 1981, after his bibliophilic predecessor; Sylvia Beach Whitman took over the running of the shop in 2003 at age 22.[1]

Whitman was always a colorful and crotchety presence around the bookstore. He welcomed his young guests to the book-lined bedrooms above the store with an avid hostliness, asking each only to provide a short "biography" and photograph and to do their bit of work in the morning; his temper could easily rise, though, and failing to manage oneself properly might find one grabbing one's rucksack and fleeing the city somewhat ahead of schedule. He loved to have americans on hand and would always cook them pancakes of a Sunday, brewing up a thin ersatz "syrup" out of some burnt sugar and water as a vague tribute to the erablic majesty of the high, breathing leaves and the track-addled mountains of his old abandoned homeland.

A documentary titled "Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man", by Gonzague Pichelin and Benjamin Sutherland, was running on The Sundance Channel in fall 2005. At the end of this George demonstrates his unique approach to hair styling by trimming his hair using flames from a candle to set his hair on fire then damping it out.