Weidenfeld £16.99 pp224

On the left bank of the Seine, set back a few yards from the river and with a perfect view of the Ile de la Cité, is one of Paris’s stranger institutions. It is a small, ramshackle second-hand bookshop, specialising in English books, a favourite with tourists, an unofficial guesthouse and site for literary happenings of varying quality. For more than 50 years, the shop, now known as Shakespeare and Company, has attracted to it men and women, mostly young and usually idealistic, whose greatest dream is to be a writer.

Jeremy Mercer, a Canadian in his twenties, was one of those whose life was changed by his time at Shakespeare and Company, and so, more than 30 years ago, was I. One of the surprises to emerge from this book is how little has changed in the place where once I worked, slept, read, got myself beaten up, failed to have sex, and listened to more pretentious bullshit than I have heard before or since. There was, and is, no bookshop quite like it anywhere in the world.

Like many who have ended up there, Mercer was on the run from his past. A crime reporter in Canada, he had betrayed a source in the criminal world and believed that his own name might be added to the murder statistics. He was lost, hungry and suffering badly from the writing bug. A shop where a would-be author could live free of charge, that required of those staying there only that they helped out in the shop and that they read a book a day, suited him just fine.

Its owner, a thin, impassioned, irascible, goatee-bearded American called George Whitman, had himself had been a wanderer before arriving in Paris in 1951 and setting up a bookshop called le Mistral. Like many eccentrics, he has a talent for marketing and in 1964 he appropriated the name Shakespeare and Company, made famous in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s by Sylvia Beach. Whitman’s tiny shop began to acquire its own legends: the great beat poets Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and Ted Joans gave readings there, Graham Greene, Lawrence Durrell, JD Salinger and Henry Miller visited. There were rumours, never denied by Whitman, that he had an affair with Anaïs Nin.

Paris, free board, books, the companionship of fellow writers: it is a potent fantasy but, as Mercer makes clear, there is more to the story of Shakespeare and Company than its reputation as a paradise for bookish hippies in the middle of Paris. Whitman doesn’t make it easy for people to like him. Avowedly communist, he has an obsessive attitude to money. Generous to strangers, he has behaved badly to his own family. Forever welcoming newcomers, he can become cranky, even brutal, towards those who have got to know him too well.

The cheery title suggests a sunnier, less interesting book than Mercer has written. Helping Whitman as age and money problems close in, he also puts his crime reporting to good use, investigating the extraordinary story of the old bookshop owner to reveal an infinitely complex and rather tragic character behind the dotty, farouche Dickensian exterior.

There are enough shocks and secrets to make this account that unusual thing — the story of a bookshop that’s a real page-turner. In the end, though, it is less about a shop than a vibrant, affectionate journey through the chilly outer fringes of the scholarly scene, thronging with those dreaming hopelessly of writing the volume that will change their lives, and dominated by a man, now in his nineties, who must be one of the strangest, most contradictory booksellers in the world.

As one who preceded Mercer by three decades (spookily, I lived in the same arrondissement before staying at the bookshop and in the same street afterwards), I could detect only one error in the small classic of literary life that he has written. Whitman claims that the story about bedbugs in his shop was a one-off press slander. Sorry, George, not true: I had the bites to prove it.

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