Part of the Shakespeare and Company story
Sylvia Beach's original bookshop and lending library — Ernest Hemingway's home away from home, and where James Joyce's Ulysses was first published. The shop closed in 1941; the current Shakespeare and Company is a successor at a different address.
Sylvia Beach opened Shakespeare and Company in November 1919 and moved it in 1921 to 12 rue de l'Odéon, directly across the street from La Maison des Amis des Livres, the French bookshop run by her partner Adrienne Monnier. Between the two shops, the little street became the exchange point of two literatures — and Beach's lending library became the university of every broke Anglophone writer in Paris. Hemingway, who arrived unable to afford books, borrowed by the armload on credit; the chapter he gave Beach in A Moveable Feast is the warmest thing in the book.
Then, in 1922, the bookshop did what no publisher in London or New York would risk: it published James Joyce's Ulysses, seeing the most notorious novel of the century through a Dijon printer and into subscribers' hands. A lending library on a Left Bank side street was, for a moment, the most important publisher in the English language.
The end came with the Occupation. In December 1941 a German officer, refused the shop's last copy of Finnegans Wake, threatened to confiscate everything; Beach emptied the premises into an upstairs flat within hours and the shop never reopened. Hemingway, by his own cheerful account, personally liberated the rue de l'Odéon in August 1944 — but there was nothing left to liberate. The Shakespeare and Company that stands today by Notre-Dame is a successor, renamed in Beach's honor in 1964 by George Whitman; the original address bears only a plaque.
Their photographs were pinned on the walls above the bowl of goldfish. In the back parlour there were manuscripts of Walt Whitman — poems scribbled on the backs of envelopes — which had been presented by the good grey poet to the aunt of Sylvia Beach …
‘It is impossible,’ said Joyce. ‘You will lose money.’ ‘Nothing is impossible,’ replied Sylvia Beach with American determination. ‘It will not interest the public,’ returned Joyce. ‘It is a masterpiece,’ declared Miss Beach, ‘and come what may it must appear.’
Sylvia Beach opens the first shop on the rue Dupuytren.
The shop moves to 12 rue de l'Odéon, opposite Adrienne Monnier's La Maison des Amis des Livres.
Publishes Joyce's Ulysses on 2 February — Joyce's fortieth birthday.
Hemingway's lending-library years; he repays the debt with a chapter of A Moveable Feast.
Beach closes the shop overnight rather than sell her last Finnegans Wake to a German officer. It never reopens.
Hemingway 'liberates' the rue de l'Odéon in August; the shop is already gone.
George Whitman renames his rue de la Bûcherie shop Shakespeare and Company in Beach's honor.
Recalled in the memoir
Sylvia Beach's original bookshop and lending library — Hemingway's home away from home, and where Joyce's Ulysses was first published. The shop closed in 1941; the current Shakespeare and Company is a successor at a different address.
Depicted in its pages
A full chapter on Sylvia Beach's shop — the goldfish bowl, the Whitman manuscripts pinned in the back parlor, and the decision to publish Ulysses.
Recalled in the memoir
The subject, the setting, and the hero — twenty-two years at 12 rue de l'Odéon, told from behind the counter.
Worked here · 1919–1941
Sylvia Beach ran the shop from behind its counter for twenty-two years — lending library, publishing house, and post office for a generation, until she closed it under the Occupation.
Frequented by · 1922–1924
A lending-library member from January 1922 — Princeton's Shakespeare and Company Project preserves his membership and borrowing records.
Frequented by · 1920–1931
James Joyce's Paris headquarters — the shop published Ulysses, banked and posted for him, and hosted the readings where Huddleston heard the thin clear voice with its ever-changing mimicry.
Frequented by
Too poor to buy books when he arrived, he borrowed from Beach's lending library by the armload, on credit.
Frequented by · 1929
He went to Sylvia Beach's shop in mid-March 1929 to ask her to publish the cheap Lady Chatterley's Lover. She refused, saying she had had enough of controversy after Ulysses, and appears to have sent him on to Edward Titus.
Sisley Huddleston wrote about Shakespeare and Company (12 Rue de l'Odéon) in Paris Salons, Cafés, Studios.
The composer lived in the mezzanine above Sylvia Beach's shop on the rue de l'Odéon — the Morgan's Ulysses centenary exhibition places him 'living in Paris above Shakespeare and Company' while he wrote Ballet Mécanique.
Literary generation · c. 1921–1929
The writers remade by war and expatriate Paris — Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Stein, Pound, and the rooms, presses, and bookshops that turned their encounters into literature.
Enter the movement
The successor · open todayShakespeare and Company (Rue de la Bûcherie)The succession was personal, not corporate: Sylvia Beach announced in 1958 that she was handing George Whitman the name of her long-closed shop, and in 1964 — on Shakespeare's 400th birthday, two years after her death — Le Mistral became Shakespeare and Company.See the shop that's open today
Adrienne Monnier's bookshop and lending library — the French half of the rue de l'Odéon, where Ulysses was read aloud to Paris before it was a book.
Visit the place
Richard Wright's Paris address for eleven years — the apartment where he wrote the books of his exile, marked since 1992 by a marble plaque.
Visit the place
The café below the Senate that served as the unofficial headquarters of Black American writers in postwar Paris, with Richard Wright at the center and James Baldwin among the regulars.
Visit the placeThe Friday Letter
The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.
