Never one to slow down, Clay was in Paris, France, this week to visit his daughter, who is studying at Oxford University, and to celebrate his 70th birthday. While there, Clay visited Shakespeare and Company, the legendary English-language bookshop in the heart of Paris, on the banks of the Seine, opposite Notre Dame Cathedral. Since opening in 1951*, the independent book store has been a meeting place for anglophone writers and readers, becoming a Left Bank literary institution. Clay, who will lead a cultural tour of Cuba later in February, notes that a young Ernest Hemingway found a welcome home at the historic Paris bookshop.
*Sylvia Beach founded the original Shakespeare and Company in 1919. Her store at 12 rue de l’Odéon was a gathering place for great expat writers of the time — Joyce, Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Pound — as well as for leading French writers.