Shakespeare and Company. 37 rue de la Bucherie, 75005, Paris
Let me tell you a story. A perfectly circular one, shaped by fate. There once was an American woman called Sylvia Beach. She was studying literature in Paris when she fell in love with Adrienne, a French bookshop owner. Sylvia set up her own English language bookshop, across the road from Adrienne’s, on the Left Bank. She named it Shakespeare and Company. Sylvia’s enthusiasm for books and authors meant that her shop became home base for writers and poets passing through Paris. Some were rather famous, with names like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Eliot, Pound, Gide, Stein, Beckett and Lawrence. Many became her friends and protégés; she championed, fed and housed those whom she could. For a writer called James Joyce, Sylvia really outdid herself. She published the first edition of Ulysses, at her own great expense, when no one else would.
