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Dear Customers,

Website orders and inquiries are processed from Monday to Friday.

Books listed on the website are not necessarily in stock at the bookshop and need to be ordered.

Thank you for your understanding 

Chers clients,

Les commandes de la librairies sont traitées du Lundi au Vendredi.

Les livres répertoriés sur le site ne sont pas forcément en stock à la librairie et doivent être commandés.

Merci pour votre compréhension


Independent Bookstore


Books

Ulysses

Ulysses
27.00 €


Yearly subscription

Year of Reading

Shakespeare and Company Year of Reading


Rare Books

The boys in the Band

The Boys in the Band
150.00 €


Gifts & Merch

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame Bundle

The Hunchback of Notre-Dame Bundle

“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 €

March 2023 new titles


New titles

Rootless
19.00 €
Now I Am Here
23.00 €
White Cat, Black Dog
22.00 €
Plot
16.00 €
Porn
19.00 €
A Terribly Serious Adventure
The Poetics of Wrongness
Humanly Possible
30.00 €
Fire Rush
19.00 €
Ladies' Lunch
13.00 €
Juno Loves Legs
19.00 €
HappyHead
13.00 €
A Stranger in Your Own City
A History of Masculinity

Shakespeare and Company's picks of the month


Books

Shakespeare and Company's picks of the Month

Monster Bogey
12.00 €

Our signed books selection


Signed Books

I Fear My Pain Interests You : A Novel
Firekeeper's Daughter
Désert Dévorant
125.00 €
Autograph Letter Signed

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.
Fest AM.jpg

16 June 2022 - 2:00 PM
16 June 2022

We celebrated the centenary of Ulysses with an afternoon at Shakespeare and Company on Thursday June 16th.
To listen to Friends of Shakespeare and Company read Ulysses by James Joyce, click here, or subscribe now wherever you get your podcasts.
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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


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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