All you had was time, until somehow, the nonstop adventure managed to come to a stop.

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(St. Martin’s Press; 262 Pgs; $23.95)

Remember your salad days? When you and your crew got smashed and split up into two cars to see who could steal more campaign signs from front lawns in the suburbs? When you played bass for that awful punk band and the crowd turned on you in Springfield, Mo., and you had to run for your life, and hop into a moving van, and you just barely made it out of town? When you met that malcontented girl or guy that summer, ya know, when you had that landscaping job? And the two of you would mash inside tool sheds and pool houses? Oh, yeah.

All you had was time, until somehow, the nonstop adventure managed to come to a stop.

It seems there is a place where the salad days never do stop. It’s called Shakespeare & Co., and it’s an ancient Paris bookstore where bohemian twentysomethings work in exchange for room and board. The “rooms” are just bedrolls in the aisles of the bookstore. The bedding is taken up each morning so tourists can roam the store where Allen Ginsberg, James Baldwin, and so many others have found shelter. (The shop is named after Paris’ first Shakespeare & Co. bookstore, where Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein once shot the breeze.) An international cast of dreamers, ne’er-do-wells, and writers move into Shakespeare & Co., stay long enough to find themselves, and eventually move on. Nonagenarian and proud communist, owner George Whitman oversees the tea parties, pancake breakfasts, and loosely controlled business affairs for the store.

Really, though, it’s the young adults that make this place so special. Their impromptu poetry readings, plays, drunken escapades, and romantic couplings make this much more than a crumbling bookstore. It’s a home for strangers, who may be angels in disguise, to paraphrase one of the store’s famous signs.

Jeremy Mercer came to Shakespeare & Co. in 1999. He was fleeing a felon whose secrets he’d divulged in a true-crime book. The criminal threatened to come after Mercer, so the lanky 29-year-old hied to Paris, quickly ran out of money, and stumbled into a four-and-a-half-month stay at Whitman’s bookstore-funhouse.

The author finds a home with a struggling British actress, an angry Argentinian called “The Gaucho,” and a young American who tries to use copies of Henry Miller’s Tropic of Cancer to pick up chicks. Mercer quickly becomes a favorite of Whitman: He’s entrusted with the keys to the store and the cash register within a single day of living there. But when a young scholar researching philosopher/critic Walter Benjamin catches George’s eye, Mercer loses favor.

Along the way, Mercer describes the struggle to stay well fed and clean in his penurious surroundings, which, at one point, includes an episode writing short stories for sidewalk passers-by for “10 francs a page.” The author also accompanies a codeine-addicted poet to a literature festival in Ireland, at which the neurotic addict experiences a miraculous redemption. Mercer chases down shoplifters, solves the mystery of the bookstore thief, and romances a young Czech girl with big, brown eyes. He even arranges an emotional meeting between the owner and his estranged daughter, which in the end, helps secure the very uncertain future of the bookshop.

Time Was Soft There is a sweet memoir of debauchery, camaraderie, and self-discovery. It stays with you.

(Also recommended: the delightful Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man, a documentary film on the adventure of living at Shakespeare & Co., featuring a number of the people mentioned in Mercer’s book, including Mercer himself.)