
Legendary Paris bookshop reveals reading habits of illustrious clientele - bookofjoe
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/15/legendary-paris-bookshop-reveals-reading-habits-ernest-hemingway-gertrude-stein-shakespeare-and-company
======
xrd
I hadn't thought of this place in a long while. It made me go back into my
email and find this:

"I visited Shakespeare and Co. a few years back with my Brazilian friend
Marco. I believe it was a place that my dad probably frequented before his
death 8 years ago. I spoke for a few minutes to Silvia about whether there was
a book which she really wanted to get rid of in the antiquity section and she
laughed and said she loved them all. But, I found a book at the top of the
shelves for my first nephew by Jack London, a book my father used to read with
my brother and me when we were younger."

This place is a gem. And, it's in the beginning of the movie "Before Sunset"
from the best American filmmaker, Richard Linklater.

~~~
EliRivers
Bonus fact; Ethan Hawke, star of "Before Sunset", turned up on his own in
Paris aged 16 and spent most of a week sleeping in Shakespeare and Co.

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gfxgirl
Now if PornHub would reveal the viewing habits of politicians maybe we'd get
some privacy laws with teeth.

~~~
WalterBright
Even better if people would stop with their fake outrage at what other people
like.

~~~
TheOtherHobbes
It's hardly fake when these are the same people who love to paint themselves
as moral authorities.

~~~
gherkinnn
As un-fake as Ted Haggard?

[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Haggard](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Haggard)

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varenc
Will my library lending habits also be publicly revealed in 90 years if I
become famous? Or will privacy laws of today still protect it?

~~~
PeterisP
In general, the legal principle is that privacy rights apply to living people,
it is considered that dead people are incapable of being harmed by invasion of
privacy or defamation - or, in general, pretty much everything else; they have
literally stopped caring about worldly trivialities like that no matter what
version of afterlife you prefer.

Even for inheritance, while we in general _mostly_ respect the wishes of the
deceased, there's a principle to limit what future conditions they may impose
on handling the property, to ensure that "the dead hand" does not govern over
the living because the wishes of the living matter more than the wishes of the
dead.

So the whole notion of post-mortem privacy is centered at protecting the
interests of _living_ people e.g. the reputation of surviving relatives. If
some horrible act is performed against a dead person, the relatives or the
community may claim that _their_ rights have been violated, but the corpse
itself has no rights. If you are dead, your most private correspondence can be
viewed by others and distributed to the public as long as the rights of any
living people (e.g. the other party in the correspondence or your relatives)
are not violated.

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mark_l_watson
Wow, that was interesting.

re: ""The handwritten cards show that in 1925, decades before he wrote his
novel The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway was borrowing Joshua Slocum’s memoir,
Sailing Alone Around the World.""

A bit off topic, but Joshua Slocum’s book "Sailing Alone Around the World"
sort-of changed my life after I read it when I was about 10. His writing was
so good, I felt like I was sailing with him. I never did long distance
cruising, but I owned capable sailboats for 24 years and sailed between SF and
northern Mexico a fair amount.

Not off topic, reading good books is transformative and too many people in
modern times substitute social media and generally reading crap on the web,
"news", etc. Anyway, I enjoyed the reading lists in the article and am passing
the article on to friends and family.

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voz_
This is one of my favorite spots in Paris.

I've found that there are far worse ways to spend an afternoon than in that
lovely bookstore.

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cjslep
I've only been once, but that store is amazing. If memory serves me right,
there's a cat resident there. Wonder if that's a long standing tradition.

~~~
lefstathiou
Don’t forget that cats serve a purpose outside of being cute and cuddly. <:3)~

~~~
agustif
Biggest rats I've seen where in Champs du Mars right there in front of the
Eiffel Tower lol

