Jeremy Mercer’s Time Was Soft There (St. Martin’s Press) is an account of “A Paris Sojourn at Shakespeare & Co.” In January 2, Mercer was staying in a seedy hotel in the north of Paris and running out of money when he dropped in at Shakespeare & Company, a legendary bookstore that looks across the Seine toward Notre Dame Cathedral. A casual conversation at the bookstore’s front desk resulted in an invitation to the weekly tea party on the third floor, and before long Mercer moved in for what became an extended stay. It was like tumbling down the rabbit hole in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland: everything changed for Mercer from the moment he found himself resident in a bookstore in Paris, in the company of an eclectic mix of vagabonds and would-be writers from all over the world. In the light of such a change in circumstance, any and everything seems possible. I know that feeling well, having stumbled upon Shakespeare and Company myself in 198 and stayed much of that summer as one of the resident “tumbleweeds.” What is so pleasing—and comforting—about reading Time Was Soft There is the discovery that so little at Shakespeare and Company has changed; all of us wish that the things we love could remain just as we first found them. George Whitman, the eccentric American who opened the present incarnation of the bookstore over fifty years ago, is as irascible as ever, despite his age. Shakespeare and Company is still “a haven for artists, writers, and other wayward souls of Paris.” And may it long remain so. (An account of life at Shakespeare and Company by Silas White appeared in Geist No. 33. —Ed.)