Jean Helfer (photo with permission from https://ifyouwantmyopinion.net) 

Earlier this year, my husband and I visited Paris. Although we had both been to the city before, this visit had some surprises. We were walking down rue de l’Odéon from Jardin du Luxembourg when I spied a clothing store and suggested we go in. Jean Helfer, the proprietor of Moicani Shop, is a quirky fellow with a graying ponytail. When he asked where we were from, I told him “The States.” Then he leaned close as if he were going to tell me a secret. “Do you know where you are standing right now?” he said.

I was speechless when he said his shop was in the original English-language bookstore named Shakespeare and Company founded by Sylvia Beach in 1919. The shop was a haven for some of the most gifted expatriates and writers of the early 20th century, authors like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound.

Helfer led us to the back of the shop and pointed to original photographs Beach had pinned to the wall of famous 20^th century expatriates and writers who considered the bookstore a sanctuary. He and previous proprietors had preserved the gallery over the years.

Then came World War II. In 1941 when the Germans occupied Paris, a military officer entered the bookstore and asked to buy a priceless first edition he had spied in the storefront window. Beach told him the book was not for sale, at which the officer declared he’d be back. Immediately she boxed up the most precious books and hid them in the attic. Then she painted over the sign on the brick edifice and locked the door as if the bookstore had never existed. Beach moved the entire inventory to the attic to save her precious books from the Nazis. 

Sylvia Beach at her 12 rue de l’Odeon bookshop

Ten years after Beach closed her store, in 1951 businessman George Whitman opened a larger bookstore on the Left Bank in a 17^th century building that once was a monastery. He named the shop La Mistral after the strong northwesterly wind that blows from the south into the Gulf of Lion.

In April 1964, on the 400^th birthday of William Shakespeare, Whitman had a change of heart. To honor Sylvia Beach who died two years earlier, he renamed his bookshop Shakespeare and Company. The new Shakespeare and Company, located on the banks of the Seine opposite Notre-Dame, quickly became a center for anglophone literary life in Paris. James Baldwin, William Burroughs, Anaïs Nin, Allen Ginsberg, Richard Wright, and Henry Miller were early visitors.

“I created this bookstore like a man would write a novel, building each room like a chapter, and I like people to open the door the way they open a book, a book that leads into a magic world in their imaginations.”

~ George Whitman

Today Shakespeare and Company is a literary institution and a meeting place for English-language writers. With the motto, “Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise,” Whitman offered a narrow bed at no charge for aspiring writers who had no other place to sleep. The beds, made up and ready for rest, are still nestled among the stacks. Since its opening, more than 30,000 people have stayed in the bookshop which has grown from one narrow room to the labyrinth of shelves and nooks of today.

If you go, look for the little cat who roams the premises and give her a pat.

In 1962, at age 75, Sylvia Beach died in her sleep in Paris. She is known for starting her own publishing house and being the first to bring Joyce’s classic novel Ulysses into print, but Beach is most loved for her support of emerging writers during the interwar period. 

Shakespeare and Company in Paris today