Jeanette Winterson on Sartre and other subjects.............

Wonderful piece from The Times................

SOMETIMES YOU JUST WANT TO LIVE inside a book.

In Paris this can happen quite literally, thanks to what might be the world's most exciting bookshop: Shakespeare and Company. Originally opened in 1919 by Sylvia Beach, who published Joyce's Ulysses and bankrupted herself in the process, the shop in its present location, overlooking Notre Dame, was revived in 1951 by a romantic American bibliophile called George Whitman. George is still alive at 94, but the shop is now owned and managed by his powerhouse 28-year-old daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman.

The ethos is as it ever was - two floors of books of every kind, new and second-hand, and a library for browsers, along with a piano if you feel like playing it. The books are all English language, and the place is open every night until 11pm, staffed by fresh-faced and optimistic twentysomethings from around the world, who work in the shop for a few hours a day, and undertake to read a book every day too, in return for a bed every night. No need to sleep with a book under your pillow when your book is a pillow; there are 11 beds hidden in the bookshop itself, like secret finds in a child's puzzle. By day they are neat and discreet, by night, not just ZZZZs but all the letters of the alphabet swarm above the heads of the hard-working dreamers.

Read her full piece at The Times online............ and visit her own website. or the British Council site.