The Shakespeare & Company

The Shakespeare & Company
Name	The Shakespeare & Company
Caption	Interior view
Established	1951
Founder	George Whitman
Location	Paris, France
Type	Independent bookstore and lending library

The Shakespeare & Company is an independent English-language bookstore and lending library in Paris noted for its association with expatriate writers, bohemian culture, and transatlantic literary exchange. Founded in the mid-20th century, it became a hub for visiting authors, translators, publishers, and artists from across Europe and the Americas, fostering connections among figures linked to Paris, London, New York City, Dublin, and San Francisco. The shop's influence extends into publishing, theatrical circles, and academic study, touching authors, poets, and editors associated with many major movements and institutions.

History

The bookstore was established in the postwar era by a former World War II participant who drew inspiration from interwar salons that convened voices like James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf, and Gertrude Stein. Its shelves and benches hosted conversations referencing writers and movements including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, linking to publishers such as Viking Press, Faber and Faber, Grove Press, Random House, and Penguin Books. During the Cold War the shop functioned as a meeting point for émigré intellectuals engaging with figures like Milan Kundera, Boris Pasternak, Arthur Koestler, and Simone de Beauvoir. Over decades it intersected with cultural institutions including Sorbonne, Columbia University, Harvard University, and École Normale Supérieure through visiting lectures and residencies.

Location and Architecture

Sited near historic Parisian landmarks, the bookstore occupies a corner close to Notre-Dame de Paris, Île de la Cité, Saint-Michel and historic quays once frequented by expatriates who read editions like Ulysses and The Waste Land. The interior features wood-paneled shelving reminiscent of antiquarian shops in Chelsea, London, Greenwich Village, and Montparnasse. Architectural echoes recall designs by Hector Guimard, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, and the ironwork of Gustave Eiffel, while the façade contributes to streetscapes alongside cafés associated with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Prévert, and Pablo Picasso. Urban conservation efforts linked to Monuments Historiques and municipal planning debates in Paris City Hall have influenced preservation of the premises.

Collections and Publications

The bookstore's stacks offer modernist, contemporary, and classic titles from authors and presses such as William Shakespeare, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Leo Tolstoy, Samuel Beckett, Sylvia Plath, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Chinua Achebe, Gabriel García Márquez, Haruki Murakami, Isabel Allende, Vladimir Nabokov, and Jorge Luis Borges. The shop maintains a lending library model used by readers studying works by John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Emily Dickinson, Rainer Maria Rilke, Anna Akhmatova, Bertolt Brecht, and Seamus Heaney. Small press imprints and in-house chapbooks have appeared alongside collections by Friedrich Schiller, Molière, Federico García Lorca, Antonin Artaud, and Jean Cocteau, with distribution networks reaching Europe, North America, Latin America, Africa, and Asia. The shop has produced newsletters, catalogs, and limited editions that drew attention from editors at The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, London Review of Books, and Poetry Magazine.

Literary and Cultural Role

Acting as a node in transnational literary circuits, the bookstore connected expatriate communities around names such as Gerald Brenan, Sylvia Beach, Ezra Pound, Henry Miller, and Anaïs Nin. It served as backdrop for memoirists and critics writing about literary life alongside references to Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Joyce's Ulysses, Beckett's Waiting for Godot, and Camus's The Stranger. The shop influenced theater companies and directors who staged works by Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter, Jean Genet, Arthur Miller, and Bertolt Brecht in venues like Théâtre de l'Odéon, Comédie-Française, Royal Court Theatre, and Off-Broadway houses. Scholars from Oxford University, Yale University, Princeton University, and Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne have cited its role in studies of expatriation, modernism, and the history of the book.

Events and Programs

Regular readings, workshops, and residencies have featured poets and novelists including Adrienne Rich, Allen Ginsberg, Patti Smith, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdie, John Steinbeck, Jeanette Winterson, Seamus Heaney, and W. H. Auden. The shop curated translation evenings involving translators of Marcel Proust, Günter Grass, Italo Calvino, Dostoevsky, and José Saramago and partnered with festivals and institutions such as Festival d'Avignon, Edinburgh Festival Fringe, Brooklyn Book Festival, Festival international de littérature, and Hay Festival. Educational programs reached students connected to Columbia University School of the Arts, Université de Paris, CUNY, and conservatories training directors for venues like Théâtre du Châtelet and Comédie-Française.

Notable People Associated

Affiliations and regular visitors spanned major literary and artistic figures: writers Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, George Orwell, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, William S. Burroughs, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, Seamus Heaney, Salman Rushdie, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, Gabriel García Márquez, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Marcel Proust, Oscar Wilde, Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, Adrienne Rich, Patti Smith, John Steinbeck, Arthur Miller, Harold Pinter, Bertolt Brecht, Jean Genet, Gustave Flaubert, Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Paul Valéry, Arthur Rimbaud, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Jacques Prévert, Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marc Chagall, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Claude Monet, Edouard Manet, Gustave Courbet, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Dorothy Parker, H.L. Mencken, and editors from The New Yorker, The Paris Review, Granta, and London Review of Books.

Category:Bookshops in Paris