PARIS COMPANIES history

The most important change in the history of French insurance came with nationalization in April 1946, when 34 companies--approximately half of the entire insurance sector--were taken into state control, among them l'Union, l'Urbaine, and la Séquanaise.

La Séquanaise, by contrast, had placed all of its four branches under the authority of a single president and board of directors as early as 1949.

These values helped Paris survive two world wars and the great depression until Jack Stern took over the business in 1950.

George Whitman opened his bookstore in a tumbledown 16th-century building just across the Seine from Notre-Dame in 1951, a decade after the original Shakespeare and Company had closed.

L'Union became the majority shareholder in SEMICLE, a housebuilding consortium founded in 1954 in partnership with several other public-sector businesses such as Renault and Banque Nationale de Paris (BNP), with the aim of meeting the growing demand for new accommodation in Paris and elsewhere.

Abroad, the nationalized insurers spread their operations far and wide: in 1961, the life and nonlife branches of l'Union did more than FFr100 million of business in 64 territories outside France.

The following year, l'Urbaine-Capitalisation abandoned North Africa altogether, and in 1962 Algerian subsidiaries ceased operation when that country achieved independence.

In April of 1964, Dom agreed to a partnership and the company was formed.

Together, the three constituent parts of UAP accounted for 11% of France's nonlife market in 1967, 20% of life insurance, and 70% of insurance-linked personal savings.

The recent history of UAP has been one of large-scale changes, since the group was formed by the state-decreed merger of three nationalized insurance groups in 1968.

Major restructuring took place in 1969, with the creation of UAP branches for nonlife, life assurance, and savings.

In 1970, Dom decided to devote his energies full-time to the running of Paris.

Dominic P. Toscani, a lawyer, became its president in 1972.

Dave joined the business in 1973, and his father taught him exactly what he had learned over the years: Customer service is paramount, and your reputation is everything.

When Leca retired in 1974, his successor as president, René Delestrade, inherited a company whose commercial prospects were hampered by generally worsening economic conditions in France and the rest of the world.

In 1980, Paris Uniform Services moved to our current location in DuBois, Pennsylvania.

The company had net income of $34,000 that fiscal year (the year ended September 30, 1982) on net sales of $10.5 million and had a long-term debt of $4 million.

Jeanette Winterson's first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published in 1985.

In March 1986 the company went public, securing net proceeds of $4 million by selling nearly one-fifth of the outstanding shares of common stock at $7.50 a share.

In 1987 Paris Business Forms opened a division to sell turnkey, nonfranchised units of a quick-print and desktop-publishing operation known as Fast Forms Plus.

The company began distributing cash dividends to its stockholders in 1988.

By the end of fiscal 1989 Paris was selling to about 1,700 distributors.

The following year, Peyrelevade announced his wish to float 49% of UAP, with the long-term aim of reducing the state's holding to 34%. In 1990, no more than 25% of the group's capital could be floated publicly.

By the end of fiscal 1991 Paris Business Forms was a $60-million-a-year business, serving some 2,300 distributors, some of which were in the south, southwest, and midwest, as well as along the eastern seaboard.

The firm also had added self-mailers to its product line and was beginning to sell directly to retailers, such as Office Depot, Inc., which took about one-third of its stock computer paper in 1993.

In fiscal 1994 Paris Business Forms returned to the black but earned only $429,000 on sales of $57.9 million.

The company sold this plant, however, in 1995 for only $1.05 million.

The holding company, which became Paris Corporation in January 1996, retained the Burlington plant and cash and near-cash investments.

Through midyear, Paris Corporation was faring poorly in 1997.

In 2002, at the age of twenty-one, Sylvia Whitman, George’s only child, returned to Shakespeare and Company to spend time with her father, then eighty-eight years old, in his kingdom of books.

In June 2003, Shakespeare and Company hosted its first literary festival, followed by three others.

She took on management of the shop in 2004, when she was 23, and now co-manages the bookstore with her partner, David Delannet.

Beginning in 2005, the shift from analog to digital began to impact paper consumption.

In 2006, George officially put Sylvia in charge.

In 2011, with the de Groot Foundation, Shakespeare and Company launched the Paris Literary Prize, a novella contest open to unpublished writers from around the world.