Shakespeare and Company (bookstore)

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Coordinates: 48°51′09″N 2°20′49″E / 48.85250°N 2.34694°E / 48.85250; 2.34694

Shakespeare and Company
Shakespeare and Company bookstore, Paris 13 August 2013.jpg
"Shakespeare and Company" store, Paris, 2013
LocationLeft Bank, Paris, France
OwnerSylvia Beach Whitman
TypeBookstore
Opened19 November 1919; 101 years ago (1919-11-19)
1922 (1922)
1951 (1951)
Website
shakespeareandcompany.com

Shakespeare and Company was the name of the iconic English language bookstore founded by Sylvia Beach in 1919 on Paris' Left Bank, and where Beach went on to publish James Joyce's "Ulysses." A later independent English-language bookstore was opened in 1951 by George Whitman, also located on Paris' Left Bank, but under a different name. Whitman adopted the "Shakespeare & Co." name for his store in 1965, and it continues to operate under that name to this day.

The original Shakespeare & Co. was established by Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate, on 19 November 1919, at 8 rue Dupuytren, before moving to larger premises at 12 rue de l'Odéon in the 6th arrondissement in 1921.[1] During the 1920s, Beach's shop and lending library was a gathering place for many then-aspiring and renowned writers and poets such as Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Ford Madox Ford.[1] The original Shakespeare & Co. was forced to close in 1941 during the German occupation of Paris. Beach was arrested and imprisoned for six months by Nazi authorities. Upon her release toward the end of the war, Beach was in ill health, and was never able to reopen Shakespeare & Co.[2]

The later and current bookstore is situated at 37 rue de la Bûcherie, in the 5th arrondissement. 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[3] and on the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's birth. Today, it continues to serve as a purveyor of new and second-hand books, as an antiquarian bookseller, and as a free reading library open to the public.[4] Additionally, the shop houses aspiring writers and artists in exchange for their helping out around the bookstore. Since the shop opened in 1951, more than 30,000 people have slept in the beds found tucked between bookshelves.[5] The shop's motto, "Be Not Inhospitable to Strangers Lest They Be Angels in Disguise," is written above the entrance to the reading library.

The four "Shakespeare & Co" bookstores in New York City, which opened starting in 1981, are not affiliated with the Paris store.

Sylvia Beach's bookstore[]

See also: Stratford-on-Odéon
12 Rue Odéon, Paris, location of the original Shakespeare and Company, with memorial plaque on the right

Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate from New Jersey, established Shakespeare and Company in 1919 at 8 rue Dupuytren. The store functioned as a lending library as well as a bookstore.[6] In 1921, Beach moved it to a larger location at 12 rue de l'Odéon, where it remained until 1941.[1] During this period, the store was the center of Anglo-American literary culture and modernism in Paris. Writers and artists of the Lost Generation, such as Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, George Antheil, Djuna Barnes, Mina Loy, and Man Ray, among others, spent a great deal of time there. The shop was nicknamed "Stratford-on-Odéon" by James Joyce, who used it as his office.[7] Its books were considered high quality and reflected Beach's own taste. The store and its literary denizens are mentioned in Hemingway's A Moveable Feast. Patrons could buy or borrow books like D. H. Lawrence's controversial Lady Chatterley's Lover, which had been banned in Britain and the United States.

Beach published Joyce's controversial book Ulysses in 1922.[8] It, too, was banned in the United States and Britain. Later editions were also published under the Shakespeare and Company imprint.[9] She also encouraged the publication in 1923, and sold copies of Hemingway's first book, Three Stories and Ten Poems.[10]

At her bookstore, historic figures made rare appearances, readings of their work: Paul Valery, Andre Gide, and T.S. Eliot; Hemingway even broke his rule of not reading in public if Stephen Spender would read with him, and Spender agreed, so Hemingway appeared for a rare reading in public with Stephen Spender.[11]

The original Shakespeare and Company closed in December 1941 during the German occupation of France in World War II.[2] It has been suggested that it may have been ordered to shut because Beach denied a German officer the last copy of Joyce's Finnegans Wake.[12] When the war ended, Hemingway "personally liberated" the store, but it never re-opened.[13]

George Whitman's bookstore[]

In 1951, a new English-language bookstore was opened on Paris's Left Bank by American ex-serviceman George Whitman under the name of "Le Mistral." Its premises, the site of a 16th-century monastery,[14] are at 37 rue de la Bûcherie, near Place Saint-Michel, just steps from the Seine, Notre Dame and the Île de la Cité.[14] Much like Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company, Whitman's store quickly became the focal point of literary culture in bohemian Paris. Early habitués included writers of the Beat Generation – Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, and William S. Burroughs, who is said to have researched sections of Naked Lunch in the medical section of the bookstore's library.[14] Other visitors were James Baldwin, Anaïs Nin, Julio Cortázar, Richard Wright, Lawrence Durrell, Max Ernst, Bertolt Brecht, William Saroyan, Terry Southern, and editors of The Paris Review, such as George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, and Robert Silvers. George Whitman had modeled his shop after Sylvia Beach's. In 1958, while dining with Whitman at a party for James Jones who had newly arrived in Paris, Beach announced that she was handing the name to him for his bookshop.[15] In 1964, after Sylvia Beach's death and on the 400th anniversary of William Shakespeare's birth, Whitman renamed his store "Shakespeare and Company," which is, as he described it, "a novel in three words."[3]

Whitman called his venture "a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore".[16] Henry Miller called it "a wonderland of books."[5] The shop has beds tucked among the shelves of books where aspiring writers are invited to sleep for free in exchange for helping around the bookshop, agreeing to read a book a day, and writing a one-page autobiography for the shop's archives. These guests are called "Tumbleweeds," after the plants that "blow in and out on the winds of chance," as Whitman described.[5] An estimated 30,000 people have stayed at the shop since it opened in 1951.

Several literary publications have had their editorial address at the bookstore, including the avant-garde journal Merlin, which is credited for having discovered Samuel Beckett, it being the first to publish him in English. Among the journal's editors were Richard Seaver, Christopher Logue, and Alexander Trocchi. Jane Lougee was the publisher. From 1959 to 1964, Jean Fanchette published Two Cities from the bookshop; the journal's patrons included Anaïs Nin and Lawrence Durrell, and it published, among others, Ted Hughes and Octavio Paz. From 1978 to 1981, a group of American and Canadian expatriates ran a literary journal out of the upstairs library, called Paris Voices. The journal published young writers such as Welsh poet Tony Curtis and Irish playwright and novelist Sebastian Barry. The editor-in-chief was Kenneth R. Timmerman and the editorial team included Canadian Antanas Sileika. Other publications established from the bookstore include Frank magazine, edited by David Applefield with contributions from writers such as Mavis Gallant and John Berger, and Whitman's own The Paris Magazine (or "The Poor Man's Paris Review," as he called it), with contributors including Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jean-Paul Sartre, Marguerite Duras, Pablo Neruda, and—in a more recent edition--Luc Sante, Michel Houellebecq, and Rivka Galchen. The first issue debuted in 1967, the most recent in 2010.

Shakespeare and Company, Entrance to Reading Library, 2015

George Whitman was awarded the Officier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2006, one of France's highest cultural honor.[17] He died at the age of 98 on 14 December 2011 in his apartment above the bookstore.[18]

Whitman's only child, Sylvia Whitman, named after Sylvia Beach, began helping her father with management of the bookstore in 2003. She now runs the shop with her partner, David Delannet, in the same manner as her father did.[19] Regular activities are a Sunday Tea Party, writers' workshops, and weekly events that have included writers such as Dave Eggers, A. M. Homes, Jonathan Safran Foer, and Naomi Klein.[19]

In 2003, Sylvia Whitman founded FestivalandCo, a literary festival that was held biennially at the park next-door to the bookstore, Square René-Viviani. Participants included Paul Auster, Siri Hustvedt, Jeanette Winterson, Jung Chang, and Marjane Satrapi.[20][19]

In 2010, the bookstore launched The Paris Literary Prize for unpublished novellas, with a top prize of 10,000 euro provided by the de Groot Foundation. The winner of the first contest was Rosa Rankin-Gee, whose entry, The Last Kings of Sark, was subsequently published by Virago. The winner of the second prize was C. E. Smith; his entry, Body Electric, was co-published by the bookstore and The White Review.

Partnering with Bob's Bake Shop, Shakespeare and Company opened a café in 2015, located next door to the shop in what had been, since 1981, an abandoned garage. The café serves primarily vegetarian food, with vegan and gluten-free options. George Whitman had been trying to open a literary café in the same space since as early as 1969.

In 2016, the bookstore published its own history in a book titled Shakespeare and Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart, edited by Krista Halverson with a foreword by Jeanette Winterson and an epilogue by Sylvia Whitman. Other contributors to the book include Ethan Hawke, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Allen Ginsberg, Anaïs Nin, Robert Stone, Ian Rankin, Kate Tempest, and Jim Morrison. The book features an illustrated adaptation of Sylvia Beach's memoirs. It also includes a selection of George Whitman's letters and journals written along his "hobo adventures" during the Great Depression. The kindness he received from strangers along the way inspired the founding ethos of the bookstore: "Give what you can; take what you need."[5]

The bookstore was a sanctuary for some twenty of its customers during the November 2015 Paris attacks.[21][22]

At the end of October 2020, the bookstore reported that its sales dropdown 80% since March due to the outbreak of COVID-19. During the first lockdown in France, the bookstore was closed for two months and didn't sell online, following the advice from the trade body of the . The owner of the bookstore informed the media that they receive offers of support and order for subscriptions to the shop's Year of Reading offer, and they will maintain a website open.[23]

In popular culture[]

  • Shakespeare and Company features in Richard Linklater's film Before Sunset, Nora Ephron's Julie & Julia, and in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris.[24]
  • The store and the owner George Whitman were the subject of Portrait of a Bookstore as an Old Man, a 2003 documentary film directed by Benjamin Sutherl and Gonzague Pichelin.[25]
  • Shakespeare and Company is showcased in the Hong Kong TVB drama Triumph in the Skies 2 when characters Ron and Myolie Wu are reading and sleeping in the store.[26]
  • Shakespeare and Company is featured in the third season of Highlander: The Series as a bookstore in Paris operated by Watcher Don Salzer. In the fourth season, the Immortal Methos uses a hidden room in the bookstore's cellar as storage space for his ancient journals.
  • Sylvia Beach and her bookshop feature prominently in the first part of 'The Woman from Saint Germain' by J.R. Lonie [Simon and Schuster 2019] set in wartime France.
  • The writer Jorge Carrion mentioned the bookstore in his awarded essay Bookshops.[27]
  • Rishabh Chaddha (Contributing Writer/Correspondent at Medium [1]) has interviewed Sylvia Whitman about Bookselling Business Ecosystem and how independent bookshops can keep themselves relevant in an uncertain business environment.[2][28]

See also[]

  • Nuvola apps bookcase.svg Books portal
  • Flag of France.svg France portal
  1. ^ Jump up to: a b c Glass (2009), pp. 24–27.
  2. ^ Jump up to: a b Glass (2009), pp. 33 & 415.
  3. ^ Jump up to: a b Glass (2009), p. 415.
  4. ^ Jo Lennan. "Paris: 10 Things to Do – 4. Shakespeare and Company Bookshop". TIME. Retrieved 14 October 2014.
  5. ^ Jump up to: a b c d Halverson, Krista (2016). Shakespeare and Company: Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart. Shakespeare and Company Paris. ISBN 979-10-96101-00-9.
  6. ^ Kert (1999), p. 112.
  7. ^ Glass (2009), p. 24.
  8. ^ Silverman, Al (2008). The Time of Their Lives: The Golden Age of Great American Publishers, Their Editors and Authors. Truman Talley. ISBN 9780312350031.
  9. ^ Meyers (1985), p. 82.
  10. ^ Meyers (1985).
  11. ^ Beach, Sylvia (1991). Shakespeare and Company. U of Nebraska Press. ISBN 9780803260979.
  12. ^ Glass (2009), pp. 205–207.
  13. ^ Garner (2010).
  14. ^ Jump up to: a b c Sharkey (2002).
  15. ^ Winterson, Jeanette (15 December 2011). "Jeanette Winterson remembers George Whitman". The Guardian. Retrieved 14 October 2014.
  16. ^ Mercer (2005).
  17. ^ A. Craig Copetas (7 June 2009). "Hemingway's Hangout Spruces Up to Defy Amazon". Bloomberg. Archived from the original on 20 October 2014. Retrieved 14 October 2014.
  18. ^ Simons, Marlise. "George Whitman, Paris Bookseller and Cultural Beacon, Is Dead at 98", The New York Times, 14 December 2011.
  19. ^ Jump up to: a b c Mulholland (2010).
  20. ^ Festivalandco.com
  21. ^ Jarry Lee, "Paris Bookstore Shakespeare & Co. Sheltered Customers During Attacks", BuzzFeed, 14 November 2015.
  22. ^ Claire Phipps and Kevin Rawlinson, "Paris attacks kill more than 120 people – as it happened", The Guardian, 14 November 2015.
  23. ^ Flood, Alison (28 October 2020). "Legendary Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company begs for help in pandemic". the Guardian. Retrieved 30 October 2020.
  24. ^ Berger (2011).
  25. ^ Anita Gates (10 October 2005). "What's on Tonight: Sundance". The New York Times. Retrieved 14 October 2014.
  26. ^ "Places to Visit - Shakespeare and Company Bookstore; Paris", Little and Random Thoughts, 18 August 2013.
  27. ^ Riding, Alan (1 December 2017). "A Love Affair With Bookstores (Published 2017)". The New York Times. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 30 October 2020.
  28. ^ Chaddha, Rishabh. "Shakespeare & Company, Paris : An Interview with Sylvia Whitman". Medium. Retrieved 16 December 2020.

Bibliography

Further reading

  • Spitzer, Mark (2010) ''After the Orange Glow. Boulder, Colorado: Monkey Puzzle Press.
  • Spitzer, Mark (2010) Writer in Residence: Memoir of a Literary Translator. New Orleans: University of New Orleans Press.

External links[]


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