Paris Cafe: The Select Crowd

This charming biography takes as its subject Le Select, a Paris cafe that thrived for eight decades as a ""microcosm of the best of the coffeehouse tradition... and the human rhythm of a living place."" Since the1920s, Le Select has been a favorite haunt for heroes and mavericks of the art world: Anais Nin and Henry Miller, Ernest Hemingway and Miro, Bill Murray and Kristin Scott-Thomas. But celebrities are just the first of Le Select's charms, revealed as ""a small gem of a place"" through brief looks at the characters who inhabit it, a number of telling anecdotes and brilliant illustration; Tulka's moody, exuberant caricatures of the waitstaff and the regular crowd are even better than the famous faces that precede them. Anyone with a soft spot for Paris or cafe culture will find much to love.