Legendary Paris bookshop reveals reading habits of illustrious clientele | Hacker News Reader

Legendary Paris bookshop reveals reading habits of illustrious clientele

theguardian.com

82 pointsbookofjoe17 comments

I hadn't thought of this place in a long while. It made me go back into my email and find this:

"I visited Shakespeare and Co. a few years back with my Brazilian friend Marco. I believe it was a place that my dad probably frequented before his death 8 years ago. I spoke for a few minutes to Silvia about whether there was a book which she really wanted to get rid of in the antiquity section and she laughed and said she loved them all. But, I found a book at the top of the shelves for my first nephew by Jack London, a book my father used to read with my brother and me when we were younger."

This place is a gem. And, it's in the beginning of the movie "Before Sunset" from the best American filmmaker, Richard Linklater.

The Before trilogy is a gem of modern cinema.

Bonus fact; Ethan Hawke, star of "Before Sunset", turned up on his own in Paris aged 16 and spent most of a week sleeping in Shakespeare and Co.

Now if PornHub would reveal the viewing habits of politicians maybe we'd get some privacy laws with teeth.

Even better if people would stop with their fake outrage at what other people like.

It's hardly fake when these are the same people who love to paint themselves as moral authorities.

As un-fake as Ted Haggard?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ted_Haggard

That's pretty much how the Video Privacy Protection Act[0] was passed.

[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_Privacy_Protection_Act

Will my library lending habits also be publicly revealed in 90 years if I become famous? Or will privacy laws of today still protect it?

In general, the legal principle is that privacy rights apply to living people, it is considered that dead people are incapable of being harmed by invasion of privacy or defamation - or, in general, pretty much everything else; they have literally stopped caring about worldly trivialities like that no matter what version of afterlife you prefer.

Even for inheritance, while we in general mostly respect the wishes of the deceased, there's a principle to limit what future conditions they may impose on handling the property, to ensure that "the dead hand" does not govern over the living because the wishes of the living matter more than the wishes of the dead.

So the whole notion of post-mortem privacy is centered at protecting the interests of living people e.g. the reputation of surviving relatives. If some horrible act is performed against a dead person, the relatives or the community may claim that their rights have been violated, but the corpse itself has no rights. If you are dead, your most private correspondence can be viewed by others and distributed to the public as long as the rights of any living people (e.g. the other party in the correspondence or your relatives) are not violated.

If the privacy laws of today manage to protect your library lending habits 90 years after your death, then these will truly be dark days for future historians.

Wow, that was interesting.

re: ""The handwritten cards show that in 1925, decades before he wrote his novel The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway was borrowing Joshua Slocum’s memoir, Sailing Alone Around the World.""

A bit off topic, but Joshua Slocum’s book "Sailing Alone Around the World" sort-of changed my life after I read it when I was about 10. His writing was so good, I felt like I was sailing with him. I never did long distance cruising, but I owned capable sailboats for 24 years and sailed between SF and northern Mexico a fair amount.

Not off topic, reading good books is transformative and too many people in modern times substitute social media and generally reading crap on the web, "news", etc. Anyway, I enjoyed the reading lists in the article and am passing the article on to friends and family.

This is one of my favorite spots in Paris.

I've found that there are far worse ways to spend an afternoon than in that lovely bookstore.

I've only been once, but that store is amazing. If memory serves me right, there's a cat resident there. Wonder if that's a long standing tradition.

Bookstore cats are ... kind of A Thing:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=bookstore+cats&ia=images&iax=image...

Don’t forget that cats serve a purpose outside of being cute and cuddly. <:3)~

Biggest rats I've seen where in Champs du Mars right there in front of the Eiffel Tower lol

Reply on news.ycombinator.com