100 Years of Shakespeare & Company Bookstore In Paris [View all]

Last edited Sat Nov 16, 2019, 01:48 PM - Edit history (1)

Once a haven for modernist pioneers, the beautifully cluttered bookshop is now a legend, known for letting travellers stay the night– if they write an autobiography. The Guardian, Nov. 15, 2019. Excerpts:

There are currently 4,000 reviews of Shakespeare and Company on TripAdvisor. Many of them describe the shop as “magical” or “a dream”. Some mention its pedigree – the famous writers including F Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway who went there, the films and TV programmes shot there. Even those that don’t rate the shop – who think the stock isn’t good enough or complain that it’s too crowded – recommend visiting, talking of its history and its proximity to Notre Dame.

As a Paris landmark, which turns 100 this month, it is ranked below the Eiffel Tower and above the crumbling angels of Père-Lachaise cemetery. But how does a bookshop become a place of pilgrimage, a tourist trap and an emblem for a city, all at once?



There are no Shakespeare and Company equivalents in any other city..There’s the fact that the shop itself is beautiful: the dark wood, creaking like a ship, low-hanging absinthe-coloured lanterns giving off a dim, gold light. Its slight disorderliness – books stacked on the floor, wedged in too-small gaps on shelves, rested in the rungs of ladders – is undeniably attractive in a world where the majority of our novels are bought on the recommendation of an algorithm on a clean, white website. And its location is perfect too, allowing it to claim some of the long-dissipated bohemian charm left over by the artists and intellectuals of the old Rive Gauche, while being a quick walk from tourist favourites.

But much of Shakespeare and Company’s tourist-drawing power comes from its glamorous history. The original shop was founded by Sylvia Beach, one of many American expats after the first world war drawn by the lure of Parisian life and the declining value of the franc. Beach’s life story is inextricable from that of Shakespeare and Company. She and her long-term partner, bookshop owner Adrienne Monnier, opened the shop in Paris in 1919. It was immediately frequented by the stars of the French literary scene, such as Valery Larbaud and Jules Romains. Ezra Pound soon followed. Then TS Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Fitzgerald, Joyce, Hemingway.



37 Rue de la Bucherie, Paris Left Bank in the shadow of Notre Dame, 2nd store opened 1951

The shop barely made a profit but no matter; this was a social movement, not merely a bookshop. Maybe it helps that the 1920s are the definitive time for literary salons in the public imagination: we see the names of modernists, we think of Gertrude Stein and Alice B Toklas, the Bloomsbury Group.. Hemingway and Joyce are the stars of this fabled milieu. In addition to bookselling, Beach was a publisher. In 1922, she published Ulysses in English for the first time, printing 1,000 numbered copies on handmade paper..

It was supposedly Beach’s refusal to sell her last copy of Finnegans Wake to a German soldier in Vichy France that led to her closing the shop – the soldier threatened to confiscate her books, which were hidden on the fourth floor. She comforted American soldiers being sheltered by the French resistance, hid Arthur Koestler in her attic from the Nazis, and was interned in a camp for her anti-fascist sentiments...

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/nov/15/100-years-shakespeare-and-company-paris-modernist-tourist

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakespeare_and_Company_(bookstore)



Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare & Co.