George Whitman, the owner of Shakespeare and Company, the fabled Paris bookstore, died today. For months, he sheltered me in his bookstore as a vagrant teenager just out of high school. He was crazy and wonderful. He was 98 years old.

When he is buried with proper in Paris’ famed Pere Lachaise cemetery, he deserves to have his memorial made a site of pilgrimage every bit as much as Wilde, Balzac, and Morrison. Actually, much more than Morrison, if we’re honest.