Words of Wisdom

Today's photos are from Shakespeare and Company book store on the left bank in Paris. If you are a book-lover and you have never been, put it on your "to do" list. A must-see in this lifetime!

The first photo is the outside of the shop. 

The second photo is a message from the store's owner George Whitman, which reads as follows: "Some people call me the Don Quixote of the Latin Quarter because my head is so far up in the clouds that I can imagine all of us are angels up in Paradise. And instead of being a bonafide bookseller I am more like a frustrated novelist. Store has rooms like chapters in a novel and the fact is Tolstoi and Dostoyevfski are more real to me than my next door neighbors. And even stranger is the fact that before I was born Dostoyevski wrote the story of my life in a book called 'The Idiot' and ever since creating it I have been searching for the heroine a girl called Nastasia Filipovna. One hundred years ago my bookstore was a wine shop hidden from the Seine by an annex of the Hotel Dieu Hospital which has since been demolished and replaced by a garden. And further back in the year 1600 our building was a monastery called La Maison du Mustier. In Medieval times each monastery had a Frere Lampier whose duty was to light the lamps at nightfall. I have been doing this for fifty years now it is my daughter's turn. GW "

The third photo is the "step-up" into the main room of the bookstore and it inspires me every time I step upon it.