None of the obituaries I’ve read for Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who died on Monday at the age of 101, mentioned George Whitman. The two men were friends in Paris in the post-war years, and Whitman opened Le Mistral (the name later changed to Shakespeare & Company) in 1951, two years before Ferlinghetti opened City Lights in San Francisco. For the next half century and longer – Whitman died in 2011 – the two men were the most famous booksellers in the English-speaking world: one at the edge of North America, the other in the center (at least according to the French) of Europe. People visited their shops not just for books but for glimpses of their owners, which were easy to come by in Whitman’s case, as he often manned the cash register. (He also gave young travelers shelter.) From their distant, cluttered sanctums they nurtured writers, championed literature, and inspired a new generation of booksellers who have seen that days spent surrounded by books, and people who love them, can be conducive to a long life.
