Shakespeare and Company (8 Rue Dupuytren)

The place, briefly

Shakespeare and Company did not begin on the rue de l'Odéon. It began around the corner, in a tiny shop on the rue Dupuytren — a short, narrow street a minute's walk uphill — where Sylvia Beach opened her bookshop and lending library on 19 November 1919. The plan itself had flipped nationalities before it found the address: Beach had first imagined opening a French bookshop in New York, found the costs impossible, and was turned around by Adrienne Monnier — whose own shop stood a block away — toward the idea's mirror image: an American bookshop in Paris.

The shop was small and the formula was complete from the first day: books for sale in front, a lending library for members who could not afford to buy, and a proprietor who treated introductions as part of the trade. Monnier steered her French literary friends around the corner to subscribe, and the Left Bank's Anglophone arrivals found their way soon after. Everything the famous shop became — the lending cards, the hospitality, the traffic between French and American letters — was already running in miniature on the rue Dupuytren.

The premises were outgrown almost immediately. In the summer of 1921 Beach moved the shop to larger rooms at 12 rue de l'Odéon, directly across from Monnier's La Maison des Amis des Livres — the address where Ulysses would be published and the legend would be made. The little first shop reverted to the quiet of its side street, which is roughly where it remains; the plaques and the pilgrims all belong to the later addresses, and the rue Dupuytren keeps the modest secret of being where the whole story started.