It was a bright sunny October noon when we decided to go on a walking tour of Paris' Left Bank. A few steps along the archaic Quartier Latin and we were suddenly in a time warp, transported to a simpler, more beautiful time. It's an old, old district with much charm, character and hidden stories on every street.

We stop at this independent book store, the oldest English one in Paris. If in 1919, the likes of Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemmingway and James Joyce sat amidst these yellowing books to talk and write about life and revolution in the nineteenth century, today, young, bright writers meet there to discuss current maladies like modern love and other such indoor sports.

Some people call me the Don Quixote of The Latin Quarter because my head is so far up in the clouds that I can imagine all of us are angels in Paradise. And instead of being a bonafide bookseller I am more like a frustrated novelist. Store has rooms like chapters in a novel. And the fact is Tolstoy and Doestoyevski are more real to me than my next door neighbors, and even stranger is the fact that even before I was born Doestoyevski wrote the story of my life in a book called ‘The Idiot' and ever since reading it I have been searching for the heroine, a girl called Nastasia Filipovna. One hundred years ago my bookstore was a wine shop hidden from the Seine by an annex of the Hotel de Dieu hospital which has since been demolished & replaced by a garden. And further back in the year 1600, our whole building was a monastery called La Maison du Mustier. In medieval times each monastery had a frere lamper whose duty was to light the lamps at nightfall. I have been doing this for fifty years, now it's my daughter's turn.

G.W.