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Some History Of Shakespeare and Company:
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In 1919, an American expatriate in Paris named Sylvia Beach set up a bookstore slash small publishing house slash lending library in rue Dupuytren and called it Shakespeare and Company. It was back then a very small place, and it functioned as an ordinary bookstore. It was later moved to rue de l’Odéon, where it had a bigger space. It was not long after the names that are now looked upon as literary giants, the names we always mention in Literature classes, gathered there to write and read the books that were available.
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Beach’s excellent taste in books was noted by many people, and it was she who made available to readers the books that were otherwise banned in the United States and the United Kingdom. Because of the people who gathered there and the books that people came to read, Shakespeare and Company soon became the center of literary culture. Among the people who frequented the place were Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce, just to name a few who enjoyed spending his time at this bookstore so much that he considered it his office.
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The bookstore remained open until the year 1941, when the Germans occupied France. Sadly after several attempts at reviving the bookstore, it never again became open for business.
Then walks in Mr. George Whitman …
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. (George Whitman shortly before his passing)

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(The bookstore today).
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In 1964, after Sylvia Beach’s death, Whitman renamed his store “Shakespeare and Company” in tribute to the original, describing the name as “a novel in three words”.  He called the venture “a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore”. Customers have included the likes of Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, and Richard Wright. The bookstore has sleeping facilities, with 13 beds, and Whitman claimed that as many as 40,000 people have slept there over the years.

George Whitman died at the age of 98 on December 14, 2011. His daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman, now runs the store. Regular activities are Sunday tea, poetry readings and writers’ meetings. The four Shakespeare and Company bookstores in New York City, which opened starting in 1981, are not affiliated with the Paris store.
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Now your most likely wondering why I bring up this iconic historical site right?
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Now enter, Novelist Carl Baker, and his new novel release titled, “14 Days In July” …
He and his co-writer Marc Heberden are thrilled that their novel was accepted to be sold in the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris, France!

It only seems fitting for the novel to be sold there since the book is packed with historical places about The French Revolution, and the Fall of Bastille. I myself just finished reading Carl’s novel, and will be writing my own review here on my blog soon, but I wanted to announce this very important accomplishment for my friends and client, Carl Baker and Marc Heberden, who is also an award-winning journalist himself. If you have not read their novel as of yet, the reviews are fantastic, as they should be, because I really enjoyed this novel. I’m normally not a history reader, but this book keeps your captivated with every turn of the pages. And there are some ‘secrets of history’ you won’t find in your average school history book!
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About The Book:
1 July 1789, Paris – Two weeks before the Revolution

France is undergoing a political upheaval unlike anything it has known before. Louis XVI is using savage mercenary forces and food blockages, to bring the people to heel. The country is a powder keg, and Paris is the fuse. In the midst of what could become bloody chaos, shadowy people including the sinister and brutal chief of the Paris police-discover that a young Parisian laundress, Michèle Duvallier, whose fiancé is imprisoned for his political activities, knows a deadly, ancient secret that could shake France’s monarchy to its core. Michèle finds herself the object of a murderous manhunt. Her imprisoned fiancé’s citizen’s group, now led by his brother, is being chased from one hiding place to another. It is only during the fall of the Bastille that she learns why so many powerful people are hunting for her, but as well the shocking identity of who has been betraying them ….
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September 1654, Burgundy – 135 years before the Revolution
A good-natured young man, an orphan, is mysteriously imprisoned with grotesque instructions to conceal his identity in such as way as to ensure he is to be forgotten for all time ….
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The man in the iron mask was not a pure invention of Alexandre Dumas. The rumor of the existence of twin boys being switched, one of whom was to become Louis XIV, had been speculated on for well over a hundred years by many high sources including Voltaire, who secretly told friends he had seen the man unmasked, and saw he was the king’s twin. But what Dumas, and no one else, wrote about, was the even more dangerous rumor that there was not only a switch, but as well … another lineage ….
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A Wonderful Book Review:

For a New Author, this book is a Master piece … 5 Stars!
This review is from: 14 Days in July (Paperback)