SHAKESPEARE AND COMPANY, PARIS

 

'I created this bookstore like a man would write a novel, building each room like a chapter'

In 1951, American George Whitman opened Le Mistral, a bookshop for English literature on the Left Bank of the Seine. In 1964, the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, he renamed the bookstore to Shakespeare and Company, in honor of the bookseller he so admired – Sylvia Beach. Beach, had famously opened her bookstore under the same name in 1919, without her assistance James Joyce’s controversial Ulysses might have never appeared. 

Like Beach’s store – where authors such as Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Eliot regularly walked in – Whitman’s store became a meeting place for writing Paris. ‘I created this bookstore like a man would write a novel, 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.’ Whitman said. 

Aspiring writers were welcome to stay for free on the beds placed between the bookshelves under three conditions: they had to read a book a day, contribute a few hours of work in the shop, and write a one-page autobiography for the store’s archives. Over 30,000 ‘Tumbleweeds’ (as Whitman affectionately called them), have slept in the shop since. Whitman’s daughter Sylvia has continued the bookshop’s legacy since 2003 – in the spirit of her father and the other legendary Sylvia.