It's a spell that this bookshop casts on a few people.
My name is Sylvia Whitman and I'm 27.
I just had my birthday so I had to think a minute.
And my occupation is bookseller.
This experiment company run by Sylvia Beach was open between 1919 and 1941.
And during that time she became the centre, the centre for anglophone writers.
She's very famous for hosting people like Hemingway and Fitzgerald and James Joyce as a pound.
She's really had an unbelievable set of characters going through her bookshop.
She's a role model for all booksellers.
Every bookseller should look up to her.
She was so passionate about literature that it was more important for her
that people actually read the books and she lends it to them rather than them buying the book.
She's a formidable character actually and it's really an honour to be named after her.
The current Shakespearean company was opened in 1951 by my father George Whitman.
He found this incredible space and he already was a bookseller in Boston.
He decided to open a bookshop here.
Actually it was his old friend Lawrence Fellingetti, the poet and bookseller who suggested that he open a bookshop here.
He is the most eccentric person that most people have ever met.
I think he was pretty wild in those days.
He just can't stand boundaries like an 18 year old.
He lives within his books.
It's a math book.
Mr Whitman likes to keep it like that.
William Barrows researched his book Naked Lunch in the library upstairs.
It's got a charm because you never know what kind of books you'll find.
He had his head in a book literally from the day he could start reading.
Alan Ginsberg did a lot of readings here.
Gregory Corso stole a lot of books here.
So eccentric and bohemian, shy and generous.
A bookshop like here or a bookshop like City Lights is where things happen and it is a community.
This is why I asked Lawrence Fellingetti why did he go into publishing.
He was like, if you have a bookshop like this and there's a movement going on, that is where it happens and that's what happened with the beat writers.
My name is Pablo. I'm a 20 year old and I'm a student in English literature and in cinema.
Since the day he opened the bookshop he has invited young writers to come and stay amongst the books in the bookshop.
In exchange for a bed they help clean the bookshop and organise the books.
And we still continue that today. We let four or five struggling writers come and stay in the bookshop.
That's where we keep our sleeping bags.
It's sort of the inspiration room where everybody leaves their message and we're supposed to write in there but it's not comfortable.
I never write in there.
Two brushes here. This is one of the rooms of the library. People can come here and grab whatever book they like and read it.
But at night it serves as the room where we sleep.
It comes from, I don't know, I think a Yeats poem talking about flowers, tumbleweeds going through the wind.
And Dad liked this idea of people who come and stay in his bookshop being like tumbleweeds who pass through with the wind.
A Canadian girl is sleeping here right now. This is where I generally write because we have the best light.
And this really small bed over here is where I sleep.
We don't use a typewriter obviously, they don't work.
And it's rather small and uncomfortable.
And I guess many great writers have written in this same desk and in this very same typewriter.
But it's nice because when I lie here I can see books all around here.
It looks like kind of a labyrinth and while it's cozy.
The new generation has something to do with the new kind of technology that we're undergoing at the moment.
And I'm excited to see what it will be.
Dad says he's going to stay here until he's 100.
He's going to be reading his books, he's going to be working in the bookshop.
And I have completely succumbed to the same thing.
