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PUBLIC HOLIDAY OPENING HOURS IN MAY:

Monday May 1st - CLOSED
Monday May 8th - Open as usual
Thursday May 18th  - CLOSED
Monday May 29th - CLOSED

HORAIRES D'OUVERTURES POUR LES JOURS FERIES DU MOIS DE MAI :

Lundi 1er mai - FERMÉ
Lundi 8 mai - Ouvert aux horaires habituels
Jeudi 18 mai - FERMÉ
Lundi 29 mai - FERMÉ


Independent Bookstore

Events & Podcasts


6 June 2023 - 7:00 PM
6 June 2023

Join us on our terrace (weather permitting), for a very special evening with Hernan Diaz, discussing Trust his 2023 Pulitzer Prizewinning novel.

Hernan Diaz's first novel, In the Distance, was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. He is also the author of a book of essays, and his fiction has appeared in The Paris Review, Granta, McSweeney’s, and elsewhere. A recipient of a Whiting Award and the winner of the William Saroyan International Prize, he has been a fellow at the New York Public Library’s Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers. His work has been translated into more than twenty languages. Trust is his second novel.  

This event is organised in collaboration with Editions l’Olivier and is part of the Festival Quartier du Livre.
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1 June 2023 - 6:30 PM
1 June 2023

What could the age of Caesar and Cleopatra tell us about the future of democracy?

Join us for a special discussion with Prof. Lex Paulson on his new book, an adventure story of ideas centering on the Roman statesman Cicero. “Cicero and the People’s Will” tells how the great orator survived plots, exile, and the rise of Julius Caesar to establish an idea -- popular sovereignty through an elected elite — that failed in his time but has shaped the modern world.

Did the flaws in our political system begin here? Could some Ciceronian creativity help us fix them and invent a better form of democracy?

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25 May 2023 - 4:00 PM
25 May 2023

Join us at tea-time for a very special signing with the brilliant Dolly Alderton.

Free. Open to all.

Dolly Alderton is a writer and broadcaster. She has written three Sunday Times best-selling books, Everything I Know About Love, a memoir, Ghosts, a novel and Dear Dolly, collected wisdom from her Sunday Times Style Column. She wrote and executive-produced the TV adaptation of Everything I Know About Love, shown on BBC One in the UK and Peacock in the US over summer 2022. She has also hosted the number one podcasts The High Low, Love Stories and Sentimental in the City. She has written a column for The Sunday Times Style since 2015 and is their resident Agony Aunt.
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Books

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame


Yearly subscription

Year of Reading

Shakespeare and Company Year of Reading


Rare Books

The Tower

The Tower
320.00 €


Gifts & Merch

Navy Sweatshirt

S&Co Sweatshirt - Navy
55.00 €

“Shakespeare is the happy hunting ground of all minds that have lost their balance.”

― James Joyce, Ulysses

Our Merch


Gifts & Merch

La banane Sh&Co

Le Sac Banane
38.00 €


Gifts & Merch

In-Store Gift Voucher

In-Store Gift Voucher
15.00 € - 100.00 €

May 2023 new titles


New titles

Broken Light
21.00 €
Small Worlds
21.00 €
The Mess We're In
21.00 €
Fourteen Days
21.00 €
A Life of One's Own
26.00 €
A Spectre, Haunting
Goodbye Eastern Europe
August Blue
26.00 €
Chain-Gang All-Stars

2023 Women's Prize Shortlist


2023 Women's Prize Shortlist

Black Butterflies
Fire Rush
19.00 €
Trespasses
13.00 €
The Marriage Portrait
Demon Copperhead

Newsletter

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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


22 February 2023 - 7:00 PM
22 February 2023

Registration closed.
On Wednesday February 22 at 7pm, Shakespeare and Company will welcome the BBC World Book Club with special guest, Marie Darrieussecq. The brilliant French author will be discussing her work in general, and in particular Pig Tales, her feminist fable of political and sexual corruption, that has become a modern classic. Pre-registration is essential and places are very limited. 

Marie Darrieussecq

23 September 2022 - 1:00 PM
23 September 2022

Join us at Festival America from Thursday 22 to Sunday 25 September, where Shakespeare and Company will have a pop-up store in the Salon du Livre.
Find out more on the festival website.
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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.”
George Whitman


Books

Shakespeare and Company: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart

A Brief History of a Parisian Bookstore

Shakespeare and Company is an English-language bookshop in the heart of Paris, on the banks of the Seine, opposite Notre-Dame. Since opening in 1951, it’s been a meeting place for anglophone writers and readers, becoming a Left Bank literary institution.

The bookshop was founded by American George Whitman at 37 rue de la Bûcherie, Kilometer Zero, the point at which all French roads begin. Constructed in the early 17th century, the building was originally a monastery, La Maison du Mustier. George liked to pretend he was the sole surviving monk, saying, “In the Middle Ages, each monastery had a frère lampier, a monk whose duty was to light the lamps at nightfall. I’m the frère lampier here now. It’s the modest role I play.”

When the store first opened, it was called Le Mistral. George changed it to the present name in April 1964—on the four-hundredth anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth—in honor of a bookseller he admired, Sylvia Beach, who’d founded the original Shakespeare and Company in 1919. Her store at 12 rue de l’Odéon was a gathering place for the great expat writers of the time—Joyce, Hemingway, Stein, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Pound—as well as for leading French writers.

Through his bookstore, George Whitman endeavored to carry on the spirit of Beach’s shop, and it quickly became a center for expat literary life in Paris. Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Anaïs Nin, Richard Wright, William Styron, Julio Cortázar, Henry Miller, William Saroyan, Lawrence Durrell, James Jones, and James Baldwin were among early visitors to the shop.

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