Sylvia Whitman

Sylvia Whitman is remarkably relaxed, considering she's the driving force behind the 2008 Shakespeare & Co. Literary Festival, scheduled to begin June 12, the morning after her interview with PW. The four-day event featured 30 renowned authors from half a dozen countries, 24 readings, six panel discussions and two parties, all held at various venues around central Paris. “Lawrence Ferlinghetti is arriving tomorrow. I'm so grateful he's attending,” the 27-year-old owner of Shakespeare & Co. says about the legendary poet and founder of City Lights Bookstore.

While Shakespeare & Co.—famous as a beat generation hangout in the '50s and '60s—has been around for 57 years, it's only the third time it has held a literary festival. “If you want to run a bookshop these days, you have to do things to be a bit different, not just stand behind the till,” Whitman says.

Contrary to what many believe, the current Shakespeare & Co. is not the haven for Lost Generation writers that Sylvia Beach founded in 1919 and Ernest Hemingway immortalized in A Moveable Feast. That store was shut down by the Nazis in 1941 and its owner sent to an internment camp for six months. Ten years later, George Whitman, Sylvia's father, opened a bookstore, originally calling it Le Mistral, but with Beach's permission renamed it Shakespeare & Co. in 1964.

“We got so bored, talking about all this history linked to the original Shakespeare & Co.,” she says. “It was the most incredible era, the '20s in Paris. We get asked a lot about it, understandably. But it made us reflect: why are we always having to talk about what happened 80 years ago? Why are we not talking about what's going on now?”

Another reason for launching the festival, Whitman says, was to change popular perceptions of the store, which her father officially transferred to her in January 2006. The store was “dusty” and “things were a bit sad,” when she first started working there six years ago, she says. “It was very transient. People would come in a few times and that was it.” Some complained it was “rundown,” others that it was just a tourist attraction. “[The festival] was my way of stamping against that and saying, 'No, no, we've cleaned up, there's something happening here,' ” she says. “It was an explosion of energy.”

Despite being named after the proprietor of the original Shakespeare & Co., Whitman confesses that she never thought she'd ever work at the store, much less own it. After her parents divorced when she was six, she grew up in Great Britain. Interested in theater, she rebelled against her parents' expectations that she “be a bookworm.” Shakespeare & Co. “wasn't really a part of my life at all,” she recalls. Whitman returned to Paris in 2002 only because she wanted to get to know her dad a bit more, “and the best way to get to know him was to get to know the bookshop first,” she explains. “The shop is so magical. I fell in love with it.”

Besides sponsoring the festival, which she plans on holding every other summer, Whitman has completely modernized the store, which includes installing a computerized inventory system for the store's 28,000 new titles (though not the used and antiquarian books). To complement the English-language titles from U.K. and U.S. publishers, Whitman has also stocked up on French novels in translation, while drastically cutting back on guidebooks. She's also reined in the store's “tumbleweeds”—young writers who sleep on the second floor in exchange for assisting the store's six employees a few hours each day—whittling their numbers down to a maximum of six from as many as 15 in previous years. “There's such a special feeling there, I didn't want to change it too much,” she says. “I just wanted to improve it.”

Calling Ferlinghetti her “surrogate parent,” Whitman remembers him telling her that the “logical thing” for an independent bookseller to do is to publish books as well as sell them, as he himself did in San Francisco. “Obviously, we haven't done that,” she says. “For me, right now, the logical thing is the festival. That's my version of City Lights Publishers.”