Shakespeare and Company
"We wish our guests to enter with the feeling they have inherited a booklined apartment on the Seine which is all the more delightful because they share it with others."
One of my favourite spots in Paris is Kilometer Zero, or what I call "The Center of the Universe".
Kilometer Zero is right in front of Notre Dame, on Ile de La Cité. It is the point to which all the highways in France refer to when they say
"Paris <so many> km".
If you stand on Kilometer Zero, facing Notre Dame, you will see a bridge on your right (one of 34 bridges of Paris), it is the Pont au Double. Cross that bridge. Now you are on the left bank of Seine. The large street along the river is St. Michel. Cross it. Now there is a tiny park and after that, you are in front of Shakespeare and Company (37 rue de la Bucherie), the most charming bookstore on earth.
1917 ~ Sylvia Beach ~ Shakespeare and Company, a bookstore and lending library
In 1917 Sylvia Beach, the daughter of a Presbyterian minister in New Jersey, opened an American bookshop in Paris called Shakespeare and Company. It was a bookstore, a lending library, and centre of activity and contact for English-speaking writers and artists in Paris. James Joyce's Ulysses was first published by Shakespeare and Co., and books like Lady Chatterley's Lover, banned in England and the U.S. were available to buy or to borrow. James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Andre Gide, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Archibald MacLeish, Thornton Wilder, Katherine Anne Porter, Janet Flanner, Samuel Beckett, Virgil Thomson, Harry Crosby, Sherwood Anderson, and many others frequented the place and found some sort of a contribution to their careers. If nothing, Sylvia Beach rerouted their mail for them when they travelled.
There are many web sites about Shakespeare & Co. on the web. I will just mention a couple of them (before moving onto today's Shakespeare and Co. under the caring ownership of George Whitman):
http://thinkparis.com/guides/shakespeare.cfm ~ Here you can take a virtual tour of the store.
http://www.harbour.sfu.ca/~hayward/paris/shakespeare.html ~ Here you can read how Michael Hayward came across the bookstore and ended up living there for 6 weeks. Great photo of the bookstore. (Michael is a bookworm and the rest of his web site is worth taking a look. He and his bookworm friends have a very organized book club and their activities are well documented in their site.)
2002 ~ George Whitman ~ Shakespeare and Company, the rag and bone shop of the heart
I won't have to say a lot here. George Whitman's brochure will explain everything and with some excellent photographs of the store, too. The brochure is 12 pages, the cover page is right here, then just keep clicking on the "next page".
Shakespeare & Co. Book Store ~ Next Page