Shakespeare and Company

Shakespeare & Company
Left Bank facing Notre Dame
37 rue de la Bûcherie
Paris 5
Largest Stock of Antiquarian English Books on the Continent.
The bookstore Henry Miller calls a wonderland of books.

Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate from New Jersey established Shakespeare and Company in 1919 on 8 rue Dupuytren. The store functioned as a lending library as well as a bookstore. Beach moved to a larger location at 12 rue de l'Odéon in 1921, where the store remained until 1941. During this period, the store was considered the center of Anglo-American literary culture and modernism in Paris. Writers and artists of the "Lost Generation," such as Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, George Antheil, Man Ray and James Joyce spent a great deal of time at Shakespeare and Company. The books were considered high quality and reflected Beach's own literary taste. Shakespeare and Company, as well as its literary denizens, was mentioned in Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. Patrons could buy or borrow books like D. H. Lawrence's controversial Lady Chatterley's Lover, which had been banned in England and the United States.

Beach initially published Joyce's book Ulysses in 1922, which was banned in the United States and in the United Kingdom. Subsequent editions of Ulysses were published under the Shakespeare and Company imprint in later years.

The Shakespeare and Company store on rue de l'Odeon was closed in December 1941, due to the occupation of France by the Axis powers during World War II. It is alleged the store may have been ordered shut because Beach denied a German officer the last copy of Joyce's Finnegans Wake. The store at rue de l'Odéon never re-opened.
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