Paris Café: The Select Crowd
"A tribute so pleasant and persuasive that swarming tourists may make it difficult for Fitch and Tulka to find a table." --KirkusIn this droll, delicious little volume,Fitch and Tulka provide an affectionate portrait of the Select Cafe, one of those famous Paris eateries that have served as candles to intellectual moths--French, American, and otherwise--for nearly a century. As Fitch reels off anecdotes about those who spent time writing, chatting, caffeinating, and dreaming in the Montparnasse spot, the book reads like a Who's Who of twentieth-century arts circles with cameo appearances by Hemingway, Bunuel, Brassaï, Giacometti, Beckett, Picasso, Noguchi, de Beauvoir, Satie, Poulenc, Baldwin, and Godard. The text, by the author of several books on American expatriates in Paris, is slender and sketchy, but that leaves more room for Tulka's marvelous line drawings, which capture the essences not only of the café's celebrity patrons but also its proprietors and waiters, along with numerous guests whose names are not known, but who are blithely immortalized. --Booklist