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. This store has rooms like chapters in a novel and the fact is Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky are more real to me than my next door neighbors and even stranger to me is the fact that even before I was born Dostoyevsky wrote the story of my life in a book called "The Idiot" and ever since I have been searching for the heroine, a girl by the name of Nastasya Philippovna. One hundred years ago my bookstore was a wine shop hidden from the Seine by an annex of the Hotel Dieu hospital which has since been demolished and replaced by a garden. 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 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.

-George Whitman