s more time passes, I realize how strongly the Shakespeare and Company bookstore has affected me. When I discovered the Shakespeare & Co. Web site recently, with its "virtual visit" through the rooms, memories flooded back as fresh as if they were just weeks ago.

I lived at Shakespeare & Co. as a "Tumbleweed" for roughly six weeks of my 1980 summer. Our numbers varied from week to week and day to day: a motley assortment of transients from all over the world, each of us living out the Paris stage of our own private European picaresque. It was all word of mouth, of course, the fact that you could find a bed in this venerable literary institution overlooking the Seine, in exchange for a couple of hours work a day. Bookstore and library by day, after hours the upstairs rooms became simple dorms, the couches transformed into day-beds.

George Whitman presided, but was rarely seen. If he'd had trouble sleeping, he'd open the shop early, sitting behind the front desk sipping his iced tea from a chipped water glass, watching the city get underway through the open door. Early customers would be put to work setting things up outside: dragging boxes of books marked "10F" to be lined up beneath the window, propping up the cover of the "bouquiniste"-style display to form a makeshift shelter, accordian-folding the shutters that had covered the windows of the antiquarian annex just next door. Their reward would be some iced tea, shared out from George's own into a glass just as chipped, pulled from a dusty corner.