Tuesday, August 16

In 1919 Sylvia Beach opened an American bookshop in Paris called Shakespeare and Company on 8 rue Dupuytren. The store functioned as a lending library as well as a bookstore. Beach moved to a larger location at 12 rue de l'Odéon in 1921, where the store remained until 1941. During the following two decades it became a haven for expatriate writers who came to be called the Lost Generation.  They were drawn to her well-lighted bookstore and warm hearth on the Left Bank. Shakespeare and Company evokes the zeitgeist of an era through its revealing glimpses of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas,  and D. H. Lawrence.  When no publisher would print her friend James Joyce's Ulysses, Miss Beach published it, in 1922, under her shop imprint.  The Shakespeare and Company store on rue de l'Odeon was closed in December 1941, due to the occupation of France by the Axis powers during World War II.

In 1951, another English-language bookstore was opened in Paris's Left Bank by an American George Whitman, under the name of Le Mistral. Much like the original Shakespeare and Company, the store served as a focal point for literary culture in Bohemian, Left Bank Paris. Upon Sylvia Beach's death, the store's name was changed to Shakespeare and Company. In the 1950s, the shop served as a base for many of the writers of the Beat Generation, such as Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs. Whitman's daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman, now runs the shop. The store continues to operate at 37 rue de la Bûcherie, near Place St. Michel and steps from the Seine River and Notre Dame. The bookstore is located in a building that served as a monastery in the 16th century.  George Whitman calls the bookstore "a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore". The bookstore includes sleeping facilities, with 13 beds for writers to live and work at the shop.  Regular activities that occur in the bookshop are Sunday tea, poetry readings and writers' meetings.