30’ precinct dramedy a love letter to Paris inspired by the most famous bookshop in Paris (and possibly the world).

“Instead of being a bonafide bookseller i am more like a frustrated novelist. This store has rooms like chapters in a novel and the fact is Tolstoi and Dostoyevsky are more real to me than my next door neighbours… In the year 1600, our whole building was a monastery called ‘:La Maison du Mustier.’ In medieval times each monastery had a frère lampier whose duty was to light the lamps at nightfall. I have been doing this for fifty years now it is my daughter’s turn. GW”

The most famous independent bookstore in the en3re world occupies a prime piece of real estate on the banks of the Seine in Paris, squattng in a quiet, small plaza on the short block that is Rue de B.cherie. On its time weathered green window shutters, thrown open to show Notre Dame, these words have been etched. Winking at all who pass.

When it was first opened in 1951, its founder and owner, American expatriate George Whitman called his little bookstore Le Mistral. Over the next decade, and thereafter, it became an oasis not just for its shopkeeper and employees, but for all kinds of tumbleweed artists, musicians, writers, and itinerants. A creative mecca for generations of literary heroes and aspiring writers.

Today it goes by Shakespeare & Company. A bit naughty as the original Shakespeare & Co. stood on 12 rue de l’Od.on and was opened by bookseller Sylvia Beach in 1919. Sylvia’s shop was the gathering place for the great expat writers of the Lost Generation – James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound – as well as the leading French writers of the times. But during the Nazi occupation, Sylvia was forced to clse her shop, and it would never reopen.