If you visit Paris, you might stop by Shakespeare and Company, a famous (really famously-named) bookstore frequented, back in the day, by writers including Ezra Pound, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ernest Hemingway. The store you visit has the same name as the famous venue, and although it’s a very pleasant shop, it’s not the same place.
The original Shakespeare and Company was founded in 1919 by American expatriate Sylvia Beach, who was born March 14, 1887 in Baltimore. Her birth name was Nancy, but she changed it to Sylvia for reasons she never shared. In 1901 the family moved to France when her father was appointed the director of the American student center in Paris and the assistant minister of the American Church there.
Paris made a big impression on Beach, who lived there for three years in her teens, and after the end of World War I returned permanently as a young adult. Her initial goal was to study contemporary French literature. She was researching her subject in the Bibliotéque Nationale when she found out about a place called La Maison des Amis des Livres (The House of Friends of Books). It was a combination bookstore and lending library, and Beach visited as soon as she could. She met the owner, Adrienne Monnier, and the two fell in love and lived together for the next 36 years.
In La Maison des Amis des Livres Beach attended readings by contemporary French writers, and had the idea of opening a branch of the store in New York. She didn’t have the money to do it in New York, but she did have enough cash (donated by her mother) to open an English-language bookstore/library in Paris. She called it Shakespeare and Company.
Shakespeare and Company was an immediate success, thanks in part to the many Americans visiting (and relocating to) France in the late teens and early 1920s — the exchange rate was very favorable to US currency, and the literary and artistic atmosphere of Paris was what aspiring creatives were looking for. In 1920 Beach met James Joyce at a dinner party, and he subsequently joined her library and they became friends. He confided that he was having trouble publishing his book Ulysses, so Beach published it in 1922. That brought Shakespeare and Company international recognition, but also caused Beach severe financial problems when large publishers agreed to publish Joyce’s book and Beach’s edition was eclipsed.
Her financial difficulties continued throughout the Great Depression of the 1930s, but by then Beach had a number of wealthy friends who helped support the store. They called themselves the Friends of Shakespeare and Company, and paid dues to attend readings at the shop.
The next obstacle to Shakespeare and Company was World War II. Beach managed to keep the shop open after the German Army occupied Paris, but had to close it in 1941 when she was arrested. She was released after six months, and hid her books in a vacant apartment. In 1944, Ernest Hemingway “liberated” the original shop, but it was just a symbolic gesture — Shakespeare and Company never re-opened.
Beach published her memoir Shakespeare and Company in 1956. It’s full of details about the literary scene in prewar Paris, and includes her meetings with virtually every major writer of the time. She stayed in Paris until she died at 75 in 1962. But she’s not buried there; her grave is in New Jersey, in the US.
As for the current Shakespeare and Company, it’s a bookstore opened by George Whitman in 1951. He originally called it Le Mistral, but renamed it in 1964 in honor of Sylvia Beach.
