Shakespeare and Company

Shakespeare and Company is an iconic English-language bookstore opened in 1951 by George Whitman, located on Paris’s Left Bank.

The store was named after Sylvia Beach’s bookstore of the same name founded in 1919 on the Left Bank, which closed in 1941. Whitman adopted the "Shakespeare and Company" name for his store in 1964.

The bookstore is situated at 37 rue de la Bûcherie, in the 5th arrondissement. Opened in 1951 by American George Whitman, it was originally called "Le Mistral", but was renamed to "Shakespeare and Company" in 1964 in tribute to Sylvia Beach’s store and on the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth. Today, it continues to serve as a purveyor of new and second-hand books, as an antiquarian bookseller, and as a free reading library open to the public.

Additionally, the shop houses aspiring writers and artists in exchange for helping out around the bookstore. Since the shop opened in 1951, more than 30,000 people have slept in the beds found tucked between bookshelves. The shop’s motto, "Be Not Inhospitable to Strangers Lest They Be Angels in Disguise", is written above the entrance to the reading library.

In 1951, American ex-serviceman George Whitman opened an English-language bookstore on Paris’s Left Bank under the name of "Le Mistral". Its premises, the site of a 16th-century monastery, are at 37 rue de la Bûcherie, near Place Saint-Michel, just steps from the Seine, Notre Dame and the Île de la Cité.

Much like Sylvia Beach’s historic Shakespeare and Company bookstore which had closed in 1941, Whitman’s store quickly became the focal point of literary culture in bohemian Paris. Early habitués included writers of the Beat Generation – Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William S. Burroughs, who is said to have researched sections of Naked Lunch in the medical section of the bookstore’s library. Other visitors were James Baldwin, Anaïs Nin, Julio Cortázar, Richard Wright, Lawrence Durrell, Max Ernst, Bertolt Brecht, William Saroyan, Terry Southern, and editors of The Paris Review, such as George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, and Robert Silvers.

George Whitman had modeled his shop after Sylvia Beach’s. In 1958, while dining with Whitman at a party for James Jones who had newly arrived in Paris, Beach announced that she was handing the name to him for his bookshop. In 1964, after Sylvia Beach’s death and on the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth, Whitman renamed his store "Shakespeare and Company," which is, as he described it, "a novel in three words."

Whitman called his venture "a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore". Henry Miller called it "a wonderland of books". The shop has beds tucked among the shelves of books where aspiring writers are invited to sleep for free in exchange for helping around the bookshop, agreeing to read a book a day, and writing a one-page autobiography for the shop’s archives. These guests are called "Tumbleweeds", after the plants that "blow in and out on the winds of chance", as Whitman described. An estimated 30,000 people have stayed at the shop since it opened in 1951.

Whitman’s only child, Sylvia Whitman, named after Sylvia Beach, began helping her father with management of the bookstore in 2003. She now runs the store with her partner, David Delannet, in the same manner as her father did. Regular activities are a Sunday Tea Party, writers’ workshops, and weekly events that have included writers such as Dave Eggers, A. M. Homes, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Naomi Klein.

In 2003, Sylvia Whitman founded FestivalandCo, a literary festival that was held biennially at the park next-door to the bookstore, Square René-Viviani. Participants included Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, Jeanette Winterson, Jung Chang, and Marjane Satrapi.

George Whitman was awarded the Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2006, one of France’s highest cultural honor.

In 2010, the bookstore launched The Paris Literary Prize for unpublished novellas, with a top prize of 10,000 euro provided by the de Groot Foundation. The winner of the first contest was Rosa Rankin-Gee, whose entry, The Last Kings of Sark, was subsequently published by Virago. The winner of the second prize was C. E. Smith; his entry, Body Electric, was co-published by the bookstore and The White Review.

George Whitman died at the age of 98 on 14 December 2011, in his apartment above the bookstore. His daughter Sylvia now runs the store.

Partnering with Bob’s Bake Shop, Shakespeare and Company opened a café in 2015, located next door to the store in what had been, since 1981, an abandoned garage. The café serves primarily vegetarian food, with vegan and gluten-free options. George Whitman had been trying to open a literary café in the same space since as early as 1969.

At the end of October 2020, the bookstore reported that its sales had dropped 80% since March due to the outbreak of COVID-19. During the first lockdown in France, the bookstore was closed for two months and didn’t sell online, following the advice from the trade body of the Syndicat de la Librairie française. The owner of the bookstore informed the media that they receive offers of support and orders for subscriptions to the store’s Year of Reading offer, and they now also maintain a website.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare\_and\_Company\_(bookstore)

Photo: Shadowgate