to the ceiling on three sides. And there was George in the middle, reading in this broken down armchair". With his own collection of one thousand books, and having come into a small inheritance, Whitman bought an Arab grocery in Paris and transformed it into a bookstore in 1951 at 37 rue de la Bûcherie on the Left Bank. It was first called Le Mistral, but was later renamed (in 1964) Shakespeare and Company, after Sylvia Beach's earlier Paris bookstore of the same name (1919 to 1941). Beach, who visited Whitman's bookstore, is said to have called his shop the "spiritual successor" to her own. Whitman's shop opened just two years before his friend Lawrence Ferlinghetti co-founded City Lights in San Francisco. The two men had met in Paris in 1948. Beginning in 1951, when the shop opened, Whitman invited travelers—usually aspiring writers, poets, and artists—to stay in the shop for free. In exchange, they were asked to help out around the bookstore, agree to read a book a day, and write a one-page autobiography for the shop's archives. Whitman called these guests "Tumbleweeds" after the rootless plants that "blow in and out on the winds of chance", as he described. On Sunday mornings, he would traditionally cook his guests a pancake breakfast, brewing up a thin ersatz "syrup" out of some burnt sugar and water. Since 1951, an estimated 30,000 people have slept at Shakespeare and Company in beds found tucked among the shelves of books. Whitman's only child, Sylvia Whitman, was born in 1981. She now runs Shakespeare and Company with her partner, David Delannet. Whitman was awarded the Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2006, one of France's highest cultural honors. Whitman was the subject of a documentary titled Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man by Gonzague Pichelin and Benjamin Sutherland broadcast on the Sundance Channel in fall 2005. At the end of the film, he trimmed his hair using the flame of a candle, setting his hair on fire and then dousing it. On September 26, 2007, journalist Gerry Hadden's story on Whitman, his daughter Sylvia Whitman, and Shakespeare and Company aired on NPR's The World (a co-production of the BBC, Public Radio International (PRI), and the Boston radio station WGBH). Death Whitman died on December 14, 2011, at age 98, at home in the apartment above his bookshop. He is