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When Frances Steloff was president of the American Booksellers Association she told me that my bookstore had drifted into being the sort of place that might have been designed by the world's greatest architects. I have let my imagination run wild with the result that a stranger walking the streets of Paris can believe he is entering just another of the bookstores along the left bank of the Seine but if he finds his way through a labyrinth of alcoves and cubbyholes and climbs a stairway leading to my private residence then he can linger there and enjoy reading the books in my library and looking at the pictures on the walls of my bedroom.

Over the years I have combined three stores and three apartments into a bookstore on three floors that Henry Miller called 'a wonderland of books'.

When I opened my bookstore in 1951 this area in the heart of Paris was crammed with street theatre, mountebanks, junkyards, dingy hotels, wine shops, little laundries, tiny thread and needle shops and grocers. Back in 1600 in the middle of this slum our building was a monastery with a frère lampier who would light the lamps at sunset. I seem to have inherited his role because for fifty years now I have been your frère lampier.

Looking back at half a century as a bookseller in Paris it all seems like a never ending play by William Shakespeare where the Romeos and Juliets are forever young while I have become an octogenarian who like King Lear is slowly losing his wits. Now that I am coming into my second childhood I wonder if all along I have just been playing store on one of the back alleys of history, putting obsolete books on dusty shelves while people are riding the information superhighway from one end to another of the global village.

However I can think of a few modest achievements typical of the idiosyncratic way this bookshop is managed. When a French explorer named Michel Peissel visited the bookshop I told him I had read his book of travels in Quintana Roo and hoped someday to meet him. He told me we had already met because as a student he frequented the bookstore and the books he read here inspired him to become an explorer. In fact, he said, now that I have published eighteen books I am back where it all started in the little library above the bookstore.

I like to think there is a trace of genius in all of us and in my case there might be a vague resemblance to Walt Whitman who also ran a bookstore and printing press in Brooklyn over a century ago. I feel a kinship with Walt Whitman and believe the bookstore has the faults and virtues it might have if he were the proprietor. It has been said that perhaps no man liked so many things and disliked so few as Walt Whitman and I at least aspire to the same modest attainment.

I once expected to spend seven years walking around the world on foot. I walked from Mexico to Panama where the road ended before an almost uninhabited swamp called the Choco Colombiano. Even today there is no road. Perhaps it is time for me to resume my wanderings where I left off as a tropical tramp in the slums of Panama. Perhaps like Ambrose Bierce who disappeared in the desert of Sonora I may also disappear. But after being in all mankind it is hard to come to terms with oblivion - not to see hundreds of millions of Chinese with college diplomas come aboard the locomotive of history - not to know if someone has solved the riddle of the universe that baffled Einstein in his futile efforts to make space, time, gravitation and electromagnetism fall into place in a unified field theory - never to experience democracy replacing plutocracy in the military-industrial complex that rules America - never to witness the day foreseen by Tennyson " when the war-drums no longer and the battle-flags are furled, in the parliament of man, the federation of the world ".

I may disappear leaving behind me no worldly possessions - just a few old socks and love letters, and my windows overlooking Notre-Dame for all of you to enjoy, and my little rag and bone shop of the heart whose motto is "Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise". I may disappear leaving no forwarding address, but for all you know I may still be walking among you on my vagabond journey around the world.

- George Whitman