Shakespeare and Company

Shakespeare and Company is really two bookstores separated by a decade of war and connected by a deliberate act of inheritance. Understanding the era on our shelves means knowing both.

The first was Sylvia Beach's. The American opened her English-language bookshop and lending library in November 1919 — first on the rue Dupuytren, then from 1921 at the famous 12 rue de l'Odéon, directly across from La Maison des Amis des Livres, the French bookshop run by her partner Adrienne Monnier. For the broke Anglophone writers flooding postwar Paris, the lending library was the whole education: Hemingway, who couldn't afford to buy books when he arrived, borrowed by the armload on credit and repaid the debt with one of the warmest chapters in A Moveable Feast. And in 1922 Beach did the thing no commercial publisher on either side of the Atlantic would do: she published James Joyce's Ulysses herself, seeing the century's most notorious novel through the press of a Dijon printer and into the hands of subscribers — making a Left Bank bookshop, briefly, the most important publisher in the English language.

The first shop did not survive the Occupation. The store closed for good in 1941 — the legend, told by Beach herself, is that a German officer, refused her last copy of Finnegans Wake, threatened to confiscate everything, and the entire stock vanished into an upstairs flat within hours. Beach was later interned; the shop never reopened. In August 1944 her friend Hemingway, rolling through the city with the liberation, made a point of stopping at the rue de l'Odéon — to 'liberate' the street personally, as both of them enjoyed telling it.

The second act began in 1951, when George Whitman — an American ex-serviceman whose Depression-era wanderings had taught him the hospitality he later made a creed — opened an English bookshop called Le Mistral at 37 rue de la Bûcherie, in a building that had once been part of a sixteenth-century monastery, facing Notre-Dame across the Seine. It became to the Beat Generation what Beach's shop had been to the Lost one: Ginsberg, Corso, and Burroughs all haunted it, and a new generation of little magazines — Merlin, which first published Beckett in English, among them — used it as an editorial address. Henry Miller, closing the circle with our shelves, pronounced it 'a wonderland of books.'

The name passed with Beach's blessing — she announced the gift at a 1958 dinner — and in 1964, after her death and on Shakespeare's four-hundredth birthday, Whitman renamed Le Mistral in her shop's honor. He called the result 'a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore,' and ran it accordingly: beds tucked between the shelves, where aspiring writers — 'Tumbleweeds,' blown in on the winds of chance — could sleep free in exchange for a few hours' help, a book read a day, and a one-page autobiography for the archive. By the shop's own count, more than thirty thousand people have taken the deal since 1951. The motto painted over the library door states the theology: 'Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.'

Whitman died in 2011, aged ninety-eight, in the apartment above the shop; his daughter — named Sylvia, for Beach — runs it today with her partner, having added a literary prize, a festival, and a café next door. The through-line from 1919 is unbroken and entirely intentional: an English-language bookshop on the Left Bank that treats literature as something between a public utility and a religious order. It remains the single best place on earth to stand inside this catalog.