Leave the digital world behind

The printed page reigns supreme at Shakespeare and Company as it celebrates its 100th birthday.

Shakespeare and Company is on the Left Bank 

We used Google Walk to find our way to Shakespeare and Company, tucked in a little square near the Seine, just across the river from Notre Dame.

Shakespeare and Company is a mecca for tourists and writers in the summer. A beautiful autumn day is a better time to visit.

Are you ready to step back in time and open the door to Shakespeare and Company?

Open Door

Open Books

Open Mind

Open Heart

Are you sure this is how you want to spend an afternoon in Paris?

This wonderful Alice quote is over a doorway. I photoshopped it into the picture of Aggie, the resident cat.

Sylvia Beach founded Shakespeare and Company 100 years ago

There are many recent articles on Shakespeare and Company that honour its rich history. There is a great article in The New York Review of Books that examines the astonishing life of Sylvia Beach:

The Secret Feminist History of Shakespeare and Company

One hundred years ago this month, the Shakespeare and Company bookshop opened its doors for the first time. As we celebrate the centennial, the popular story of the shop’s founding is sure to be retold. The origin story of the shop often goes as follows: during the 1920s, Sylvia Beach, a devoted enthusiast for the literary genius of her time, decided to set up shop. From there, Beach’s biography is often framed as a Cinderella story of Modernism. When James Joyce asked her, an amateur bookseller, to publish Ulysses and she rose to the occasion, she underwent a transformation from an anonymous shopkeeper into an internationally famous figure. Beach then provided a home for expatriates like Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald who came to Paris during “Les Années Folles,” France’s version of the Roaring Twenties.

 

Revisiting the story behind Shakespeare and Company’s creation reveals that its roots lie in early twentieth-century feminist activism and, in particular, Beach’s own deep-rooted conviction that women had a right to an intellectual life

The Secret Feminist History of Shakespeare and Company

Sylvia Beach was forced to close Shakespeare and Company in 1941 after she refused to sell a first edition of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake to a Nazi officer. She was arrested and detained in an internment camp in Paris for six months. When she was released, she went into hiding until the end of the war. She never re-opened her bookstore.

In 1951, another American, George Whitman, opened a small bookshop, Le Mistral, in the run-down Latin Quarter of Paris. Beach became a regular at Le Mistral and designated it as the spiritual successor to her Shakespeare and Company.  She offered Whitman the name “Shakespeare and Company.” He accepted Sylvia’s offer and Le Mistral was rechristened Shakespeare and Company on William Shakespeare’s 400th birthday in 1964.

Today, Shakespeare and Company is run by Whitman’s daughter, Sylvia Whitman, named by her father in honour of the original founder of Shakespeare and Company.

The wallpaper on the stairs features famous writers who frequented Shakespeare and Company

Can you type? Can you write?

There are 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 rootless plants that “blow in and out on the winds of chance.” 

An estimated 30,000 Tumbleweeds have stayed at Shakespeare and Company

Did you learn to type on one of these typewriters?

Shakespeare and Company has rooms like chapters in a novel

Fiction and poetry are medicines for the mind

Small steps will no longer get us to where we need to go.
So we need to leap

Naomi Klein is a celebrated Canadian author and social activist who reached international audiences with her book, No Logo. She is featured in Shakespeare and Company for her Leap Manifesto and her call for climate justice.

Girl, we couldn’t get much higher

I snapped this photo because Jim Morrison, an American singer songwriter and poet, is ranked by Rolling Stone as one of the greatest singers of all time. Do you remember the first time you heard Light My Fire? As I snapped the photo, my sister mentioned that Jim Morrison is buried in a famous graveyard in Paris. So I did a bit of research and discovered that Morrison is buried in Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, one of the city’s most visited tourist attractions and the most visited graveyard in the world. Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, French cabaret singer Edith Piaf, and many other poets and artists are also buried there. But the most popular grave in Père Lachaise Cemetery is that of Jim Morrison.

If you are of a certain age, you may remember when Jim Morrison and his band, The Doors, appeared on The Ed Sullivan Show. Every Sunday night, from 1948 to 1971, The Ed Sullivan Show was beamed live into every living room in Canada and the US. Jim Morrison and The Doors performed their No. 1 hit Light My Fire on The Ed Sullivan Show on Sept. 17, 1967. Just before their live performance, The Doors were told that they had to change a line in Light My Fire from “Girl, we couldn’t get much higher” to “Girl, we couldn’t get much better” because the original lyrics could be interpreted as referring to drugs. Jim Morrison sang the song as written and was forever banned from future appearances by a furious Ed Sullivan 

Jim Morrison was found dead in a bathtub in Paris on July 3, 1971 at the age of 27. A heroin overdose is the suspected cause of death. His girlfriend buried him in Père Lachaise Cemetery because walking through the graveyard was one of the few places where he felt at peace with himself.

I wish I could show you when you are lonely or in darkness the astonishing light of your own being

This hauntingly beautiful poem was written by Hafiz, a 14th century Persian poet

You can post a message on the message board

Can you think of a better birthday message?

It was my birthday on the day we visited Shakespeare and Company. I’m not 100, like Shakespeare and Company, but I may reach that number.

Happy Birthday, Shakespeare and Company