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.

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