Streaming · Clip

Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man (2003)

Clip from the Sundance Channel documentary Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man: The Temple Priest

In 1951, George Whitman opened a bookshop-commune in Paris. George, 92, still runs his "den of anarchists disguised as a bookstore," offering free, dirty beds to poor literati, cutting his hair with a candle and gluing the carpet with pancake batter. More than 40,000 poets, travelers and political activists have stayed...