Me at the front desk of Shakespeare & Co. during that 1980 summer. Note the stack of books to the left, waiting to be priced. And face out on the pillar behind my head, books of poetry by A. E. Houseman, Ted Hughes, and that favorite of Henry Miller, the inimitable Blaise Cendrars. I can't quite make out the title of the book that I had in my hands that morning...

ork might be staining new bookshelves with rags dipped into a battered pot of cold, strong tea. Or washing windows with a pungent blend of ammonia and water, applied with ripped up newspapers. Or scrubbing the tile floors with rags and buckets of barely soapy water. If you were lucky, work might be tending store in George's absence, answering questions about books in stock, making sales. Occasionally we'd even manage to evade work for a day...

Each book sold was stamped inside with the trademark Shakespeare-head stamp, ringed with the words "Kilometer zero, Paris" (the kilometer zero marker - a brass disk from which all road measurements in France are reckoned - was set into the pavement just across the Seine, in front of Notre Dame).

Poetry readings were held irregularly in the library upstairs, and I remember one or two occasions when we tumbleweeds would hold our own impromptu reading amongst ourselves, when the shop had been shup up tight for the night. There would be a hurried collection of francs, and one of us would slip away to the "Au Gargantua" bakery and patisserie just a couple of blocks away, to pick up some wine. We'd pick volumes off the library shelves, or if more adventurous, creep downstairs into the darkened store to find some other favorite from the general stock. The classics, usually: Whitman, Yeats, but I remember trying to share the enthusiasm that I then felt for Kerouac's On the Road, reading the unsurpassed "roman candle" passage aloud, or the closing paragraphs, with their haunting evocation of everything that has been lost, and sought, and never found again...