Shakespeare and Company, a bookshop on rue de la Bûcherie since 1951

Shakespeare and Company, an English-language bookshop at 37 rue de la Bûcherie, facing Notre-Dame, opened in 1951. The American George Whitman founded it as Le Mistral. In 1964, for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth, he gave it the name of Sylvia Beach’s bookshop, which he admired.

On rue de l’Odéon, Sylvia Beach had welcomed Hemingway, Pound, Fitzgerald and Joyce, whose Ulysses she published in 1922, before closing in 1941. At George Whitman’s, the Beat writers Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso and William S. Burroughs slept among the books. Henry Miller and Richard Wright came by too.

Whitman lodged travellers, the “tumbleweeds”, in the beds upstairs, in exchange for some help in the shop and a book read each day. His daughter Sylvia took over in 2001 and created a literary festival and later a prize. George Whitman died in 2011, in his flat above the shop.

The bookshop sells new and antiquarian books among towering piles, quotations and second-hand furniture, and opened a literary café in 2015. It stands on the banks of the Seine in the 5th arrondissement and holds readings every week.