Shakespeare and Company

Shakespeare and Company, bookstore that was established on the Left Bank in Paris in 1919 by Sylvia Beach. In addition to offering the usual bookselling services, Beach’s shop functioned as a literary center during the 1920s and ’30s, providing a lending library and a congenial meeting place for American expatriates and the larger artistic community. Writers who visited Beach’s shop included André Gide, Paul Valéry, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Beach achieved notoriety by publishing Joyce’s novel Ulysses (1922), which had been rejected by several established publishers; segments of the book had been judged obscene in England and the United States. The 1,000-copy first printing of the novel was sold exclusively by her shop, and over the next 11 years she sold some 28,000 copies of 14 further printings. Beach’s shop remained in operation until 1941, when it closed permanently during the German occupation of Paris in World War II.

In 1951 American bookseller George Whitman opened a store, Le Mistral, on the Left Bank directly opposite the Notre-Dame Cathedral. In April 1964 he renamed the store Shakespeare and Company in honor of the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth and of Beach’s former store. Whitman’s store, like the original shop, became a hub for many writers and artists, such as Allen Ginsberg, Anaïs Nin, Richard Wright, James Jones, Julio Cortázar, Henry Miller, and James Baldwin.

Though Whitman died in 2011, his store remained in operation and has become a Paris landmark, having been featured in films such as Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset (2004) and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011).