Shakespeare and Company (Rue de la Bûcherie)

The place, briefly

George Whitman had spent his young manhood drifting the world on the kindness of strangers — a self-described tumbleweed — and when he settled in Paris he repaid the debt with a bookshop built on the same principle. In 1951 he bought a former grocery at 37 rue de la Bûcherie, across the Seine from Notre-Dame, and opened Le Mistral: bookshop, lending library, and free hotel for writers. Beds stood among the shelves from the beginning, and the deal never changed — sleep free, help in the shop, read a book a day, and leave a one-page autobiography for the archives. He called his guests Tumbleweeds, after himself; by now they number in the tens of thousands.

The fifties made it the Beat Generation's Paris living room: Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso read there, William Burroughs is said to have researched stretches of Naked Lunch in the shop's medical section, and Merlin — the little magazine that first published Samuel Beckett in English — used the shop as an editorial address. Henry Miller pronounced it 'a wonderland of books.' Sylvia Beach herself was a visitor — and in 1958, at a Paris party, she announced she was handing Whitman the name of her long-closed shop. He took it up in 1964, on the four-hundredth anniversary of Shakespeare's birth and two years after Beach's death, and Le Mistral became Shakespeare and Company — a second, separately owned shop carrying the first one's flag a mile downriver.

Whitman ran it for sixty years as, in his own phrase, 'a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore' — give what you can, take what you need — in a building he liked to say had been part of a sixteenth-century monastery, with the motto painted over an inner doorway: 'Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.' His daughter Sylvia — named for Sylvia Beach — joined in the 2000s and runs the shop today, adding a literary festival, a prize, and the café next door. George died in 2011, two days past his ninety-eighth birthday, in his apartment above the shop; the beds among the shelves are still made.