I first met George Whitman in 2007 when he hit me over the head with a book.

I was in Paris, standing on the pavement outside the English-language bookshop Shakespeare and Company, talking to George's daughter Sylvia, when a copy of Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London whizzed down from the third floor of the building. Direct hit - but intended for Sylvia, not me.

"What does a man have to do to get some attention around here?" I looked up, and there was George, 93, leaning out of the window in his pyjamas, taking aim with another volume.

"Dostoevsky! The Idiot! Ha ha!"

Sylvia took my arm and checked my head. "Do you want to come up and meet Dad?"

We pushed our way through the crowded shop, Sylvia stopping every two seconds to answer a question or help a customer. The books are piled over two floors – the ground floor deep and open, stacked with new and in-print titles, the upper floor a warren of second-hand volumes, anything from Gibbon to Hemingway. There's a library space for sitting and reading because this shop isn't a pay-n-go Anglo-Saxon business model, it's a place for the browser and the flâneur. You pass the time here, in the company of books.

Perched above all this, like an old eagle, is George Whitman. He used to sleep on a mattress in among the books, but along the way he managed to buy the apartment upstairs, and now he lives his book-lined life with a bed, a sink, a bath, a table and an ancient stove, the stewpot steaming up the windows and fogging the view across to Notre Dame. George likes cooking for his family - he has only one daughter, but a big, boisterous, ever-changing family, and that's the way it's been since 1951, when the demobbed GI, who had chosen Paris as his home, decided to open a bookstore.

"After the war, I was living in a hotel on the Seine, very cheap in those days, and the landlord wanted to get us out so he could make more money - he bust all the locks on the doors. But I figured this was a goo...