Shakespeare and Company

Described by Vanity Fair as “arguably the most famous independent bookstore in the world,” Shakespeare and Company inhabits the imagination and hopes of the literati. They pilgrimage to its weighted shelves in droves, some staying for months bunking on mattresses within the shop to live, breathe, dream books! In Paris! In a location crisscross from Notre Dame, the very heart of Paris’s bohemian Latin Quarter.

Every inch of space – floor to ceiling – are filled with books, the collective musings of a century’s best thinkers. Shakespeare and Company is George Whitman’s tribute to Sylvia Beach’s 1919 predecessor. Her shop’s unabashed Anglo-American character was thoroughly and refreshingly modern, becoming a hangout for the “Lost Generation”: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway himself (as memorialized in his novel A Moveable Feast). Whitman, too, cultivated a cafe society, this time favored by the Beat Generation – Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William S. Burroughs.

While its popularity has grown through references in Hollywood (movies such as Before Sunset and Midnight in Paris) indulging in its camera-ready quintessential Parisian flavor, Shakespeare and Company’s museum-quality vintage books section, the diversity of writer talks and poetry readings – no promising talent would reject an invitation – and Sunday tea holds its erudite reputation in proud standing.