Shakespeare & Company: The Bohemian Literary Haven
Why is it significant?
Conclude your walk on Rue de la Bûcherie directly outside the emerald-green storefront of Shakespeare and Company. Peer through the crammed display windows at teetering towers of secondhand books, worn velvet armchairs, and sleeping cats.
Key Facts
| Place | Shakespeare & Company: The Bohemian Literary Haven |
|---|---|
| Address | 37 Rue de la Bûcherie, 75005 Paris |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.85260, 2.34710 |
| Part of Walk | Islands of the Seine: Pont Neuf, Royal Courts, and Gothic Splendor |
| Generated | Generated |
Conclude your walk on Rue de la Bûcherie directly outside the emerald-green storefront of Shakespeare and Company. Peer through the crammed display windows at teetering towers of secondhand books, worn velvet armchairs, and sleeping cats. Gaze across the narrow branch of the Seine: the towers of Notre-Dame Cathedral rise majestically in full view.
Founded in nineteen fifty-one by eccentric American ex-pat George Whitman, this shop originally opened under the name Le Mistral. When Sylvia Beach, founder of the original nineteen twenties shop that first published James Joyce's Ulysses, died, Whitman renamed the store Shakespeare and Company in her honor.
Whitman called his bookshop a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore. He welcomed traveling writers, whom he affectionately dubbed Tumbleweeds, allowing over thirty thousand aspiring poets and novelists to sleep for free on folding benches tucked among the bookshelves in exchange for reading a book a day and helping out around the shop.
Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, and James Baldwin all gave readings beneath these timber beams. Buy a book, get it stamped with the famous round seal on the inside cover, and savor the immortal literary heartbeat of Paris.