Time Was Soft There: A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.

• Hardcover - 13 October, 2005 - St. Martin's Press
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• By: Jeremy Mercer
• ISBN: 0312347391

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Reviews by readers

This is a Winner!

Reading about life inside Paris' Shakespeare and Company was a hoot. I laughed out loud so many times I thought the neighbors would complain. I stopped reading the book for a week five pages from the end because I didn't want it to end. Jeremy nailed the character of George Bates Whitman not to mention all the other delightful characters in that toppling pile of old books that teeters on God knows what alongside the Seine.

Two years before Jeremy I introviewed George for my memoir of Hemingway. When I asked him to comb down his wild hair for a photograph, he looked at me in shock and said he hadn't used a comb for years. When he had to, he told me,he used a fork. I combed his hair with mine and shot the picture.

Now, thanks to Time Was Soft There, I learned how George got a haircut...by burning it off! Thank God we didn't get to that!

This book is a pure delight from cover to cover and I am sending a copy to an old WW2 Army buddy who was with me for that interview. I know he will laugh himself into the funny farm from reading it because his self-control is not as good as mine.

I want to visit again

Mercer has captured life At Shakespeare & Co. warts and all in an amusing straight forward manner. It certainly makes we fans want to return there.

Good Travel Book

TIME WAS SOFT THERE BY JEREMY MERCER is an unusual little novel I just couldn't put down. It takes place in a bookstore, Shakespeare & Co., in London where the excentric elderly proprietor not only sells books and holds authors' lecture nights and book-signing afternoon high teas but also invites would-be authors and poets who need a place to stay to just camp out in the bookstore's many reading rooms. He is a lonely man and these strangers keep him company, and he feels he is enabling them to further their writing careers by assigning them a book a day to read and encouraging them to produce a manuscript for him to peruse. The novel centers on one American writer, a former policeman who is escaping a life threat in the U.S., who finds Shakespeare & Co. to be his home on the run. His adventures while living among these homeless word crafters are not exciting but just unusual and an interesting read.

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