Shakespeare and Company, Paris

This is one of those special places that raises the level of charm and character in a city already bursting with it at the seams.

Shakespeare and Company is a lovely English-language bookstore in the Latin Quarter of Paris. It sits steps away from the river Seine and across the street from the Notre-Dame Cathedral. George Whitman founded this Parisian institution in 1951.

The original name of the bookstore was Le Mistral (originally it was in a different location) but in April of 1964 (the four-hundredth anniversary of William Shakespeare's birth) it was changed to honor Silvia Beach, a bookseller and owner of the original Shakespeare and Company (1919-1941). Whitman was a great admirer of Beach whose store on rue de L'Odeon was a gathering spot for Hemingway, Eliot, Joyce, Stein and leading French writers.

Shortly after opening its doors, Shakespeare and Company became a base for expat literary life in Paris. Young writers, artists and intellectuals (Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, James Jones, William Styron, James Baldwin among thousands of others), were welcomed to sleep on the small beds/benches among the shelves filled with books. Whitman called the shop a " socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore". He would ask three things of the people staying at this boarding house of sorts: read every day, help out at the shop, and write a one-page autobiography. These autobiographies now form sizable archives.

In 2006, George Whitman's daughter Sylvia took over the shop.

"Each monastery had a frere lampier whose duty was to light the lamps at nightfall. I have been doing this for fifty years. Now is my daughter's turn." George wrote on the shutters outside the store. He passed away in 2011 at the age of 98.

And no, James Joyce is not buried in the cellar, as some believe.

This is the place to get lost in for hours, browsing through the books, sitting upstairs to take it all in. A wonderful old store with creaky floors, chipping paint, the smell of old wood, and the atmosphere of an era gone by. Shakespeare and Company is a place to treasure and support.

Upstairs there is a nice photo and a short note in honor of Sylvia Beach, a figure worthy of admiration, and the owner of the original Shakespeare and Company.
In 1941 when the Germans occupied Paris, a Nazi officer demanded that Sylvia sell him her last copy of "Finnegans Wake", Beach declined. The officer said that he would return shortly and confiscate all of Sylvia's goods and shot down the bookstore. Promptly after his departure Sylvia moved all the contents of the store to her apartment upstairs. She ended up spending six months in an internment camp in Vittel. In 1944, Ernest Hemingway "liberated" the bookshop in person, but it never reopened as a business.