"Be Not Inhospitable to Strangers Lest They Be Angels in
Disguise," Shakespeare and
Company’s motto written above the entrance to the reading library.
Shakespeare and Company is the
name of two independent English-language bookstores that have existed on
Paris's Left Bank.
The first was opened by Sylvia
Beach, an American, on November 19,
1919, at 8 rue Dupuytren, before moving to larger premises at 12 rue de l'Odéon
in the 6th arrondissement in 1922.
Beach, an American expatriate
from New Jersey, developed the store as a lending library as well as a
bookstore. During the 1920s, Beach's shop was a gathering place for many
then-aspiring writers such as Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, James
Joyce and Ford Madox Ford. It closed in 1941 during the German occupation of
Paris and never re-opened.
The story is that Beach denied a
German officer the last copy of Joyce's Finnegans Wake so the Nazi’s ordered it
closed.] When the war ended, Hemingway "personally liberated" the
store, but it never re-opened.
The second bookstore is situated
at 37 rue de la Bûcherie, in the 5th arrondissement, and is still in operation
today. Opened in 1951 by American George Whitman, it was originally called
"Le Mistral," but was renamed to "Shakespeare and Company"
in 1964 in tribute to Sylvia Beach's store and on the 400th anniversary of
William Shakespeare's birth.
