Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    La librería más famosa del mundo
    Unavailable
    La librería más famosa del mundo
    Unavailable
    La librería más famosa del mundo
    Ebook359 pages8 hours

    La librería más famosa del mundo

    By Jeremy Mercer

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Con unos facinerosos pisándole los talones, el cronista de canalladas Jeremy Mercer se planta en París a la espera de algo. Cierto día, cuando deambula con aguacero y sin techo por la orilla izquierda, le ofrecen té en una fábula conocida como Shakespeare and Co. Aquella guarida es, en realidad, el segundo avatar de una fantasía ideada por Sylvia Beach en los años veinte como domicilio de una generación no más perdida que cualquier otra, un templo ya difunto pero resucitado durante los cincuenta con extravagantes consecuencias. Allí, sin ir más lejos, residieron Ginsberg, Burroughs, Ferlinghetti y otros tambores de la percusión beat. George Whitman, su nuevo sacerdote, ofrece hospedaje a cambio de trabajo a los letraheridos sin rumbo, y nuestro Jeremy acepta la generosa oferta para acabar convertido en huésped, confidente y factótum del estrafalario posadero. Lo acompañará en su aventura un formidable reparto de exotismos humanos decididos a llevar la bohemia parisina hasta las cotas más sublimes de lo descabellado. Y lo entrañable. Y lo literario. Porque la librería más famosa del mundo aloja el sueño de unas vidas reales hechas con la materia de la ficción. Este libro es la memoria de esos días.
    LanguageEspañol
    PublisherMALPASO
    Release dateFeb 1, 2014
    ISBN9788415996231
    Unavailable
    La librería más famosa del mundo

    Related to La librería más famosa del mundo

    Related ebooks

    Personal Memoirs For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Mesa De Recepción

      Apr 2, 2018

      J. ERNESTO AYALA-DIP «Me gustan los perros, los gatos (un pelín menos) y los caballos, pero cuando comienzan a mezclarse con personajes de ficción no logro que dicha mancomunidad me convenza.» Este mes me ha llegado una novela, cuya existencia descon

      3 min read

    • Article

      El Escritor Generoso

      Oct 29, 2021

      El Escritor Generoso
      6 min read

    • Article

      a VALERIO MASSIMO MANFREDI

      Oct 2, 2020

      Valerio Massimo Manfredi es arqueólogo profesional especializado en el mundo clásico, y autor internacional de más de una veintena de novelas de las que se han vendido más de doce millones de ejemplares. Ha impartido clases en universidades de Italia

      5 min read

    • Article

      Cristina Cassar Scalia

      Mar 2, 2022

      Cristina Cassar Scalia
      4 min read

    • Article

      Laura Ferrero

      Feb 4, 2021

      Laura Ferrero
      4 min read

    • Article

      Rara Como Encendida

      May 6, 2019

      Rara Como Encendida
      3 min read

    • Article

      Novedades Editoriales

      Apr 7, 2023

      Manuel Calderón TUSQUETS, 288 PP., 19 € La gran trayectoria periodística, en el ámbito cultural, de Manuel Calderón (Peñarroya-Pueblonuevo, Córdoba, 1957), que en su momento se licenció en Filosofía por la Universidad de Barcelona, ha tenido una cont

      77 min read

    • Article

      La Mejor Selección

      Apr 7, 2023

      La Mejor Selección
      11 min read

    • Article

      Elísabet Benavent (36 años)

      Mar 20, 2020

      Elísabet Benavent (36 años)
      1 min read

    • Article

      Test Literario

      Nov 4, 2021

      Test Literario
      1 min read

    • Article

      Ana Luisa Amaral

      Oct 3, 2022

      Ana Luisa Amaral
      2 min read

    • Article

      Elvira Sastre

      Feb 3, 2020

      Elvira Sastre
      4 min read

    • Article

      Novedades Editoriales

      Feb 1, 2024

      Alejandra Arévalo TRAVELER, 292 PP., 18,95 € Madrid, año 2010. Ana, una joven periodista comprometida con su profesión, se enfrenta a un importante giro en su carrera cuando recibe la oportunidad de entrevistar a la señora Senka Nikolić, supervivient

      70 min read

    • Article

      Gemma Lienas

      Mar 2, 2022

      Gemma Lienas
      2 min read

    Reviews for La librería más famosa del mundo

    3.5/5

    193 ratings13 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 5/5
      I loved this book. It took me to Paris and left me in a semi-squallid, totally sureal and mesmerizing bookstore where the occupants were writers in need of a literary fix. A wonderful story, and it is true!
    • 5/5
      I really, really liked this book. I enjoyed Paris through the eyes of the writer. I enjoyed meeting the characters that lived in Shakespeare and Co book store. I loved the owner George. I made me want to relive my youth and go and spend time living in the Paris bookstore.....
    • 5/5
      Canadian ex-newspaperman Jeremy Mercer was down on his luck and funds when he managed to find a berth at George Whitman's Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, France in late 1999. The memoir of his stay and of the people he met was first published in 2005 as "Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs: The Left Bank World of Shakespeare and Co" and later as "Time Was Soft There." The second title comes from a passage in the book where Mercer contrasts hard and soft prison time and concludes that his Shakespeare & Co. time was "soft time." Whitman's Shakespeare and Co. is the 2nd legendary store to bear that name after he inherited it from Sylvia Beach. Beach's original store was closed by the German occupation during WWII and never reopened afterwards. Beach was famous as the founder of the Paris english-language book store which also functioned as a lending library and mail-drop for many ex-pat writers in the 1920's & 1930's and she was also the first book-format publisher of James Joyce's "Ulysses". Whitman's store was originally called La Mistral when it opened in 1951 and the name-change came in 1964.The overall arc of the book is Jeremy Mercer's path from down-on-his-luck writer to Shakespeare and Company veteran alongside George Whitman's search for reconciliation with his then estranged daughter Sylvia (yes, named after Sylvia Beach) Whitman. The reading journey was definitely a soft time and is recommended for book store lovers.Further Reading:As of July 1, 2016 there is now an official history Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart available online from the bookstore's website and in stores as of late September 2016.
    • 3/5
      This should be a great book. I wanted it to be, like, so bad.

      Its a true(ish?) account of a fellow Canuck who goes to that temple of literary Gods, the used bookstore "Shakespeare & Company", ekes out an existence on one of the numerous guest cots throughout the store, interacting with the literary hopefuls scraping by working in the store, scamming, weaselling, chiselling and sometimes writing, and the owner, famous George.

      The store itself is legendary. I myself have been there, in the heart of Paris, had tea in the books-&-people packed rooms riddled with roaches and swirling with the gaga eyed sycophants like myself who wanted, somehow, to be anointed with greatness by immersing ourselves into it. Doesn't work that way though.

      I can recommend the visit. You get a free cookie. Lukewarm tea. A lab pup that buggers off with one of your mittens. A memory, a story, but not a book, or a novel, or whatever Jeremey was shooting for with this one.

      Too bad. He has skill, his material is a rich vein of solid gold, but his own persona too often becomes the theme. Memoirs of a nobody packaged as literary tribute to ghosts still needing a voice.

      3 stars.
    • 5/5
      If you love books this is a great store about a very interesting and historically significant bookstore.
    • 4/5
      An enjoyable read, showing an insider's look at one of the World's most famous book shops. I'd love to go there one day, but now just knowing a little about George the owner, and some of the shop's history, the shop has come to be more alive for me. What a wonderful idealistic thing to do, allow complete strangers to come and live, sometimes for months at a time in your book shop, beds just scattered amongst the book shelves!
    • 4/5
      Mercer spent several years as a newspaper crime reporter in his native Canada, wrote a couple of true-crime books, dodged a drug charge, fell into alcoholism and finally skipped town after angering the wrong guy. He was truly burnt-out from daily facing the worst of humanity but also feared for his life. Landing in Paris, he discovered the generous and erratic George Whitman, owner of the famous Shakespeare and Company bookstore, who allowed destitute traveling writers to sleep in his store and help out with running the place. Whitman regularly provided meals and the writers, often young Bohemians, looked up to him as a mentor, though Whitman's many quirks seem to make it impossible for anyone to really get close to him.Mercer describes how upon accepting his request to stay in the store, Whitman also told him he was responsible for evicting an old poet who had lived in the store for five years. The book tells how the many impoverished guests get by on very little or no money, learning how to pass themselves off as students for cheap meals, scavenging for thrown out food, using a cafe restroom to wash. Though he includes the confrontations and filth, the title of the book comes from Mercer's description of prison "hard time" as being the most difficult, while the time he spent at S&C as being as soft as it could be.
    • 4/5
      As someone who can spend a few hours "lost" in bookshops, Shakespeare & Co. sounds like a dream come true. Reading through Mercer's eyes and I could almost see the place for myself, the residents, the tea parties, and of course the beauty and tranquility of Paris. True, life seemed pretty difficult at times but to have that freedom of just reading a book a day, or midnight story tellings by the Seine under the shadow of the great Notre Dame, or even taking a metro/train to go over to England, Ireland, Spain, is something I would yearn for. How I wish to drop by the shop, maybe even spent a week or two in the companies of interestings would-be writers, poets, and four walls of BOOKS! But first, I need to save enough for a trip to Paris from almost a 1/4 of the globe away...
    • 4/5
      An account of the authors flight from Canada to Paris where he found and stayed at Shakespeare and Company for some months as well as stories from the earlier decades of the bookstore. It provides an easy to digest interesting look at a group of young people who haven't yet found where or if they want to build their lives presided over by an octogenarian who has built his life right there but still somehow feels he should be roaming.
    • 4/5
      “A bookshop can be a magnet for mavericks and nomads. A community hub, a haven, a platform for cultural ideas. A centre of dissent and radicalism.” — Henry Hitchings, “Browse: The World in Bookshops”Henry Hitchings was talking specifically about Lawrence Ferlinghetti's City Lights bookstore in San Francisco when he wrote those words, but he just as easily could have been thinking of Shakespeare and Company, the famous English-language bookstore in Paris within sight of Notre Dame Cathedral. Shakespeare and Company and its long-time owner George Whitman are the subjects of Jeremy Mercer's fascinating 2005 memoir “Time Was Soft There.”Mercer was a crime reporter for a Canadian newspaper, and at times in trouble with police himself, when he made the mistake of revealing a source, who then threatened revenge. Mercer fled to Paris with little money and no prospects. Like so many young people in Paris under similar circumstances, Mercer found his way to Shakespeare and Company. For decades Whitman, a devoted socialist, had operated the bookstore as a free boardinghouse for "mavericks and nomads," with preference given to aspiring writers. Over the years some 40,000 people had spent nights in the bookstore, some for years at a time, sleeping wherever they could find room.Whitman, an American, liked to tell people he was the son of Walt Whitman, which was true but it wasn't THAT Walt Whitman. He was in his mid-80s when Mercer was his guest, but still not nearly old enough to be the poet's son. Despite his socialist ideals, Whitman enforced a class system in his shop, allowing those he judged to be the best writers to use actual bedrooms on the upper floors, while others, like Mercer, had to look for space on the floor. Whitman also favored new guests over those he was starting to get tired of and attractive women over everybody else. Even at 86 he was still falling desperately in love with young women.Whitman, Mercer tells us, was also a petty thief, stealing from his own guests. His favorite reading in his own bookstore were the diaries he stole from women who stayed with him. Mercer describes Whitman wrestling with a priest over a book being sold cheaply at a book sale. He wanted the book to resale in his shop. The priest presumably wanted to read it.For all Whitman's faults, Mercer came to admire him and to want to help him protect the future of the store, which was being sought by developers because of its prime location. Mercer was able to track down Whitman's daughter, his only child and the product of his brief marriage to one of the women he fell in love with in his store. Today, following Whitman's death in 2011, Sylvia Whitman operates the store.Mercer's title refers to prison slang. For prisoners there is hard time and then there is soft time. At Shakespeare and Company, he says, time was soft.I visited Shakespeare and Company when I was last in Paris two summers ago. How I wish I had read Mercer's book first.
    • 4/5
      As every book lover knows, there is something special about a bookshop, but the famous, Shakespeare and Company, in Paris is another level again. Originally founded in 1919 by Sylvia Beach, she was the first to distribute Ulysses by joyce, and counted among her friends Scott Fitzgerald and Hemingway. After her death, George Whitman bought the stock and re-founded his own shop in homage to hers. Originally called Le Mistral, he renamed it Shakespeare and Company on the 400th anniversary of the bard’s birthday. Whitman had always been a wanderer, walking all over the States, Mexico and Central America. The charity and kindness that people showed him on his travels, inspired his philosophy “Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.” The bookshop was to become a haunt and dwelling for aspiring poets and writers, and a number of the staff lived in the shop too. He called them Tumbleweeds; they had few responsibilities, but they included, producing a short autobiography, helping out in the bookshop for a few hours a day and reading a book a day.

      Mercer started out as a journalist, reporting court cases and other news items for a local paper. After a run in with a criminal contact he decided that he need to leave Canada for his own safety. Arriving in Paris he turns up at the bookshop as he has heard that it can be a refuge. Whitman says he can stay for a while, and says he can stay in the Antiquarian room, but he must say to the current resident, a poet called Simon, that after five years it is time for him to move on. Simon proves elusive, and when he does catch up with him to pass on the news he seems distraught. They agree on a time period for him to go, but when Mercer says that Simon wasn’t going to leave, he expects a scene, but Whitman shrugs it off.

      As he settles into Paris life and the bookshop, he starts to befriend the other people that are living there. Whitman is a man who collects favourites, Mercer becomes one at one point, before the latest new member overtakes him. It is a bit chaotic, he is forever leaving money in books, there are a number of thefts from unguarded tills, and there are always new people and others moving on. They have to find places to shower and bathe and having very little money himself, he is taught by Kurt the cheapest and best places to eat from. For a time they are fed by a staff member of the New Zealand Embassy, and have to sneak in and stay quiet so they don’t get caught. And in this place of misfits, great things have emerged. It is thought that at least seven books have been written there, and many times that have been started or conceived.

      It was a really lovely book to read. Mercer has brought the bookshop and its many characters to life and gives us a flavour of Parisian life at the time. There are some funny parts too as they sail a little too close to the law. Whitman is quite a man too, flawed but generous, this bookshop that he has given to the world is now in safe hands as his daughter is now running it.

      Must pay it a visit one day.
    • 5/5
      On the run from an unfortunate mistake in his Canadian life as a crime journalist, Jeremy Mercer heads to Paris to escape for a while. Caught in a rainstorm near Notre-Dame one afternoon, he spots a welcoming light across the river and thus stumbles inadvertently on the Shakespeare and Company bookshop. Invited upstairs for tea by the beautiful woman behind the desk, wandering the labyrinth of books and beds, he soon realises that this is no ordinary bookshop and, as a poor writer, is invited to join the ranks of lost souls inhabiting the book-lined rooms.So begins his whimsical and quintessentially bohemian stay, under the watchful eye of eccentric owner George Whitman (surely the star of the book, with his fascinating life and Communist ideals), who renamed his unique store after the original literary oasis, run by his good friend Sylvia Beach, which was forced to close down during the Second World War. Here all are welcome to browse and lose themselves in their reading; tea is offered on a Sunday; eclectic readings take place in the library; literary and political opinions are argued out – and those in need of a bed will find one amongst the books in return for a few hours helping around the shop and in the kitchen.Mercer deliciously evokes days trawling the scattered tomes, nights spent storytelling by the Seine, tourists attracted by the store’s reputation, wanderers attracted by Whitman’s generosity, showering in the public washhouses, scrounging leftover food to get by: in short, a poor life, without good facilities or scope for wastage of any kind, but a happy, lively life nonetheless. The characters moving through Whitman’s utopia are many and varied, yet he remains, a kind of rock in the tides of time and tourism, as the chaos of youthful dreams and books and wine whirls around him. Of course, eventually reality bites for Mercer and it’s time to move on – but his journey is magical and the lessons of the bookstore honest. Now I have Sylvia Beach’s own book 'Shakespeare and Company’ to read, and I recommend the documentary ‘Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man’, made towards the end of Mercer’s time in Paris and readily available online. Still not sure whether to read it? Try searching online for photos of the store in all its glory – if that doesn’t persuade you, nothing will!
    • 3/5
      Time Was Soft There: a Memoir a Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co. Jeremy Mercer. 2005. What a difference a decade or so makes! Had I read this in my 20s I’d have been ready to catch the next flight to Paris! The author, a Canadian newspaper reporter who fled Canada because of a possible threat on his life ends up staying at the famous Shakespeare & Company in the 2000s. As always, I love reading about Paris especially parts I am familiar with. Our hotel on the Rue des Carmes was a just a few blocks from the bookstore and we passed it many, many times and stopped by more than once. Whitman held forth as he did in the book and there were always plenty of young people around. They shopped at “our” market at Place Maubert and whiled away time sitting in the nearby park, one of our favorite places to look at Notre Dame so the book was a little homecoming present and interesting to me because of that. But these people were NOT the writers of Hemmingway’s Moveable Feast, and I am not sure that the book would be interest to a lot of people.