Founder of Paris Bookstore Shakespeare & Co. Dies

By JENNY BARCHFIELD

Paris (AP) — George Whitman, the American bibliophile whose iconic English-language Paris bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, has been a haven for book lovers for more than half a century, died Wednesday, the store announced on its website. He was 98 years old.

Whitman “died peacefully at home in the apartment above his bookshop,” two months after having suffered a stroke, a posting on the store’s site said. Whitman “showed incredible strength and determination up to the end” and read every day with his daughter, Sylvia, his friends and his cat and dog, it said.

“Nicknamed the Don Quixote of the Latin Quarter, George will be remembered for his free spirit, his eccentricity and his generosity – all three summarized in the Yeats verses written on the walls of his open, much-visited library: ‘Be not inhospitable to strangers / Lest they be angels in disguise’,” it said.