Louvre Cements It’s Place as The World’s Most-visited Museum

The Louvre has cemented its position as the world’s most-visited museum, with a record 8.8 million visitors making the trip to the Paris home of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa and other masterpieces in 2011.

The Louvre saw a 5 per cent increase in visitors in 2011, after three years in a row in which about 8.5 million people had visited the museum, it said in a statement.

The museum said it enjoyed “a strong return of American visits and a more and more marked presence of visitors from emerging countries”.

Visitors from abroad accounted for 66 per cent of the museum’s attendees, led by tourists from the United States, followed by Brazil, Italy, Australia and China. Read the full article »»»»

George Whitman: Founder of Iconic Paris Bookstore Shakespeare and Company Dies Aged 98

George Whitman, the founder of the Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris – an iconic English-language literary hub and writers’ refuge in the heart of the French capital – has died at the age of 98.

“George Whitman died peacefully at home in the apartment above his bookstore,” the store said in a statement.

“George suffered a stroke two months ago, but showed incredible strength and determination up to the end, continuing to read every day in the company of his daughter, Sylvia, his friends and his cat and dog,” it said.

Across the Seine from the Notre Dame Cathedral in the famously literary Latin Quarter, Shakespeare and Company has been known to generations in Paris as a haunt of aspiring writers.

Visiting authors and students would work in the shop, sleep in the stacks, and soak up Paris’s literary atmosphere.

Mr Whitman founded the store as Le Mistral in 1951, later renaming it after the previous Shakespeare and Company owned by Sylvia Beach, which in the 1920s was a gathering place for writers including Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce. READ MORE