Shakespeare and Company Bookstore
One night alone in Paris, I stumbled upon a bookstore still open at 10 pm. The warm glow invited me inside to navigate narrow aisles teeming with books.
In 1919, tucked into a street near Jardin du Luxembourg, Sylvia Beach opened a bookstore and lending library called Shakespeare and Company. It attracted famous writers of the time such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, Ezra Pound, André Gide, Paul Valéry, and Jules Romans.
Known for her hospitality and helpfulness to writers, Hemingway said of Sylvia Beach, “No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.” In 1922, Sylvia Beach published James Joyce’s Ulysses through the bookstore after it had been rejected by others. The publishing effort proved exhausting and nearly dragged the bookstore under, but it was a risk Beach was willing to take to support what she believed was a great work that needed to be read.
The Nazis occupied Paris in June of 1940. Soon afterward, when a Nazi solider came into her bookstore and she refused to sell him a book, Sylvia Beach emptied the shop and brought all her belongings to an upstairs apartment. She ended up in an internment camp. The bookstore didn’t reopen, but Sylvia Beach wrote a memoir in 1959 called Shakespeare and Company before passing away in 1962.
In 1951, George Whitman opened Le Mistral Bookstore at 37 rue de la Bûcherie, right across La Seine river from kilometer zero, the point at which all French roads begin in the parvis of Notre-Dame de Paris. The bookstore building was constructed in the 17th century as a monastery. For many years, it was a wine shop hidden from the Seine by a section of the Hôtel-Dieu, the oldest hospital in Paris. That section was torn down and became a garden.
In April 1964, on the 100th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth and in honor of the bookseller he admired, he changed the name to Shakespeare and Company with the aim to carry on the spirit of Sylvia Beach’s original bookstore.
“I created this bookstore like a man would write a novel,” George Whitman wrote, “building each room like a chapter, and I like people to open the door the way they open a book, a book that leads into a magic world in their imaginations.”
In its early days, the writers, artists and intellectuals were invited to sleep in the store on small beds that were benches during open hours. George Whitman called these people Tumbleweeds, blowing in and out of the store. They were asked to read a book a day, help in the shop, and write a one-page autobiography. Among these Tumbleweeds are the actors Ethan Hawke and Geoffrey Rush.
In 2004, George Whitman turned the store over to his daughter, Sylvia Whitman, and wrote on the shutters out front: “Each monastery had a “frère lampier” whose duty was to light the lamps at nightfall. I have been doing this for fifty years. Now it’s my daughter’s turn.”
Standing on the rue de Bûcherie, I read these words right now, looking up at the four black chalkboards between the current bookstore and the special room with antiquarian books. Each board is framed dark green and written in neat, level print with white chalk. I see the number 37 in a block of white and blue to the right.
It is fitting that the person who owns Shakespeare and Company Bookstore is named for its two great icons: Sylvia (Beach) and (George) Whitman.
There are books all around outside and people stroll among the trees and the rolling book carts and shelves against the wall of the restaurant next door. I hear an intermingling of Spanish, Southern United States, Korean, French.
A few years ago, the bookstore warmed me on a cool evening, but today, almost like a room of requirement, the store cools the blaring brightness. The first room is open, but the rest of the place winds with tight shelves and staircases.
The stairs have a message reading from the bottom step to the top:
I Wish
I Could Show You
When You Are
Lonely OR
In Darkness
The Astonishing
Light
Of your own
Being
–Hafiz
The poetry is upstairs. And there is a beautiful room with a window looking out to the river featuring Notre Dame de Paris in all her magnificence. The room is set up as someone’s former bedroom, with old books and a piano and even a bed to sit on, if you’d like.
Everything is in English. At first that was a disappointment because I was looking for books in French, but it’s such a beautiful store with such a wonderful mission that it doesn’t bother me now. Perhaps I’m beginning to accept that English is the international language and it is okay. It is good to have an international language, whatever it may be, and good, too, that I know it.
I haven’t eaten yet and there is time before the hotel room will be open, so I go next door to the new Shakespeare Bookstore Café. It’s a packed, yet inviting, space and soon I’m juggling a dark green smoothie, a pesto sandwich, and a black as night coffee to a table outside with a steady view of Our Lady through the trees and across La Seine.
I meet a glass artist from Utrecht named Benjamin and his girlfriend Merrill, named for a blackbird.
We talk long enough that a leisurely walk through the Latin Quarter will bring me to Hôtel de 2 Continents at check in time.
More Information:
There are two great books about the Shakespeare and Company bookstores.
The first was written by Sylvia Beach in 1959: Shakespeare and Company.
The second was edited by Krista Halverson in 2016: Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart.
Follow the links for videos of Sylvia Whitman speaking about the bookstore and her father: here and here.
Follow the link for a video of Sylvia Beach speaking about her life story: here.
For the current Shakespeare and Company website, go here.
And more resources below:
Pound, Cath. “Shakespeare and Co: The World’s Most Famous Bookshop at 100.” BBC Culture: Books. November 19, 2019.
Williams, Hannah. “Shelf mythology: 100 years of Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company.” The Guardian. November 15, 2019.
Brouwer, Marilyn. “Americans in Paris: Sylvia Beach, Founder of the Influential Bookshop Shakespeare & Company.” March 30, 2017. Bonjour Paris: The Insider’s Guide.
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