Learning from George
picobook
Learning from George is an essay-memoir about the legendary bookstore Shakespeare & Company and its Don Quixote-like former proprietor, George Whitman. In 2000, Adrian Hornsby rocked up in Paris looking for literature. He spent the next three years living on and off among the book shelves, managing the store, watching trains of poets and ragged dreamers passing through, and discovering that what books and bookstores really reveal are lessons in humanity.
by Adrian Hornsby
Paravion Press, 2015
The original Shakespeare & Company was founded by Sylvia Beach in 1919, and in 1922 published James Joyce’s Ulysses. It was closed down during the Second World War, but in the early 1950s, George Whitman opened a successor English language bookstore a few hundred yards up the left bank. It rapidly became a hang out for Beat-generation writers and their heirs, as well as a temporary home to the literally tens of thousands of literary vagabonds who stayed there over the half-century George ran it.
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PARAVION PRESS
Paravion Press publish short works in postcard-sized editions. All titles come with an envelope and a page left blank ‘For your correspondence’. The idea is that you write something there and send the book to someone by air mail or par avion.
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