19 Nov 2021
On This Day
19 November 2021 Cheryl

19 November 1919: Shakespeare and Company opens

Shakespeare and Company, Paris

“Opening bookshop in Paris. Please send money,” read the telegram that Sylvia Beach, founder of the Shakespeare and Company book shop, sent her mother. [1]

On 19 November 1919, Sylvia Beach, a 32-year-old American living in Paris, opened the doors of a small English language bookshop and lending library, naming it Shakespeare and Company. It was one of the first bookshops in France to be run by a woman.

During the 1920s, the mostly English-language shop was a gathering place for many aspiring and renowned writers and poets such as Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ford Madox Ford. In 1922 Beach had used her own funds to publish James Joyce’s Ulysses after other publishers deemed it obscene.

Syvlia Beach with James Joyce [left] at Shakespeare and Company.

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Shakespeare and Company was forced to close in 1941 during the German occupation of Paris, and Beach was imprisoned for six months by Nazi authorities. She was released towards the end of the war, but ill health prevented her from to reopening her shop.

After WWII, George Whitman, an avid reader, settled in Paris and used his service coupons to accumulate books. In 1951 he bought an old building and opened a bookstore that he named ‘Le Mistral’. George styled his bookshop on Sylvia Beach’s model and made it a community centre for writers. For him, encouraging writers and readers was more important than selling books. George and Sylvia became friends, and in 1958 she publicly announced that she was handing the name to him for his bookshop. When Beach died in 1964 Whitman renamed his shop ‘Shakespeare and Company’ in her memory.

For any book lover, the Shakespeare and Company bookshop in Paris is a must-see. It’s been the centre of the English-speaking literary community there for over sixty years. Located just across the Seine from Notre Dame, it’s housed in a crooked 17th century building that has been transformed into a magical place filled with books, art objects, philosophical signs, and here and there, a vase of flowers or a cat.