Independent Bookstore
Events & Podcasts
Newsletter
Sign up to our monthly newsletter for information about the bookshop, upcoming events and our latest recommendations.
Friends of...
Shakespeare and Company
is a nonprofit—created in response to the pandemic and its financial consequences—to support the bookshop’s noncommercial activities, including our free author events, first-floor library, weekly podcast, and writers’ rooms, with views on Notre-Dame, where more than 30,000 poets and authors have stayed the night gratis in Paris since 1951.
Events
BookTalkBookTalkBook - A surrealist literary parody
Join us for an exclusive performance of BookTalkBookTalkBook, Jo Neary’s and Ben Moor’s absurdist parody of awkward live author events, “a Russian Doll of a show that kaleidoscopes psychedelically into itself and then evaporates” (Stewart Lee).
Free Event / Pay What You Want. As this show is performed by working comedians we will be taking donations by cash and card (suggested donation 10€). All money raised goes to the performers. Open to all. Places limited. Please arrive early to avoid disappointment.
Cerys Matthews: Out of Chaos comes bliss! On music, life and Dylan Thomas
Join us for an evening with award-winning songwriter, author and broadcaster, Cerys Matthews to celebrate the life and work of Dylan Thomas. With live music from Flora Hibberd.
Free & open to all. Places limited. Arrive early to avoid disappointment.
History
"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."
Shakespeare and Company is an independent, English-language bookshop located on the banks of the Seine, opposite Notre-Dame. It has been a meeting place for writers and readers in Paris for more than seventy years.
In 1951, Shakespeare and Company was opened by George Whitman on rue de la Bûcherie. It was given its name by Sylvia Beach, who called the shop the “spiritual successor” to her own. Beach’s bookstore, on rue de l’Odéon (1919-1941), had been a gathering place for the great expat writers of the time, including Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Eliot, and Pound—and it was Beach who first published Joyce’s Ulysses, when no one else dared.
George’s bookstore quickly became a center for anglophone literary life in Paris. James Baldwin, William Burroughs, Anaïs Nin, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Wright, Julio Cortázar, and Henry Miller were early visitors. From the first day—writers, artists, and intellectuals were invited to sleep for free among the shelves. Since then, more than 30,000 people have stayed in the bookshop, which itself has grown from a single narrow room on the ground floor to the labyrinth of books and nooks readers know today.
George’s only child, Sylvia Whitman, now runs the bookshop with David Delannet, her partner in life and business. They’ve embarked on several new adventures, including adding a café, a literary festival, a writing contest, and a publishing arm. Shakespeare and Company continues to host regular literary events, which are available for free on the shop’s podcast. Guests have included Zadie Smith, Don DeLillo, Carol Ann Duffy, Colson Whitehead, Leïla Slimani, Rachel Cusk, George Saunders, Karl Ove Knausgaard, and Jeanette Winterson.
George’s novel, this bookshop, is today still being written by a dedicated team of booksellers and by all the people who continue to read, write, and sleep at Shakespeare and Company.
Thank you for your support.
