Shakespeare & Co Bookshop

Small, cosy, packed floor to ceiling with books and a cat asleep on top of the cash register. It’s not actually cheap though, despite being a second-hand bookshop.

Referring to Shakespeare and Company as a bookshop is a bit like refering to Notre Dame as an old church. “Ulysses” would’ve been unknown only for the bookshop – it was first publihsed in 1922 by the Shakespeare and Co, then owned by Sylvia Beach. ‘Her’ version of the shop – based at rue de l’Odéon – was closed in December 1941 by the occupying German forces and never reopened.

The ‘current’ version was opened in 1952 by George Whitman and is located on the Left Bank – nearly level with the front door of Notre Dame. It’s somewhere you might be able to find a bed for the night if you’re caught short, and it’s not entirely uncommon to hear people coming in and asking if there’s room. The books are all in English, and the staff – like the clientele – tend to be Anglophones and it seems to be a popular meeting point with backpackers in the summer. (So, it’d be a good place to pick up tips and pointers, as well as books). Each book you buy there comes with an official stamp (and there are always copies of Ulysses on sale, nudge, nudge).

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This place is amazing! I’ve been to France a few times but only ran into it on my last trip I wish I had known it was there earlyer! It was like being home again. I think that anyone who exsplores this shop will feel right at home there.

Staggering out of la gare, barely awake after five days in Florence and an all-night gabfest with a gay Nigerian, I spared a glance for Notre Dame on my way to “the poorer quarters where the ragged people go” and… nearly got killed by an octogenarian on a bicycle who was wielding a bag of tenpenny nails. He jumped off his bike, asked me to help him build some bookshelves (!) and welcomed me into his weird world. This was none other than George Whitman, owner of S&Co. Ensued total craziness ranging from bookshelf building to busking to midnight rides with weird cabbies to dancing in the Tuileries to the great climactic moment, a late-night wine-sodden cafe argument with a biographer, an actor, a backpacker, and anyone else who happened by as to whether one could translate “Jabberwocky.” Yeah, I know the usual topic in Paris is the Decline and Fall of Something, but that night we were like necromancers trying to raise the body of Latin and make it dance to Lewis Carroll’s poetry.

I never did go inside the Louvre. I spent a total of thirty minutes on the rive droite. So I need to go back, and preferably in late September or October again. But another weird thing happened to me there… George told me I had better go home and buy a bookshop of my own, and when I came back, one was for sale, just half an hour away from my then-apartment. So I bought it. George, my mythical Leopold Bloom, I owe you, man.