Historic Locations & Relocation Journey
Model the original founding address, relocations over the decades, or secondary branch storefronts.
Cataloged Bookmarks
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37 Rue de la Bûcherie
37 Rue de la Bûcherie, Paris
Le Figaro: 'An American Bookseller Opens Doors to Notre-Dame'
Bookstore History
Kilometre Zero: Sylvia Beach, George Whitman & The Lost Generation
Originally opened on the Left Bank in November 1919 by American expatriate Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company was the beating heart of English-language modernist writing in interwar Paris. Beach ran both a bookstore and a lending library, providing books, mailboxes, and financial lifelines to Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and Man Ray.
Publishing Ulysses (1922)
When serialization of James Joyce’s Ulysses was blocked in England and the United States, Beach bravely took on the mantle of publisher under the Shakespeare and Company imprint, overseeing its historic 1922 Paris publication—a milestone that reshaped modern literature forever.
The Latin Quarter Revival
Though closed by Beach in 1941 during the Nazi occupation of Paris after she refused to sell her last copy of Finnegans Wake to a German officer, the spirit was reborn in 1951 when George Whitman opened his bookstore at 37 Rue de la Bûcherie across from Notre-Dame. Whitman dubbed his shop a “socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore”, famously establishing the “Tumbleweed” tradition where over 30,000 traveling writers and artists have slept among the bookshelves in exchange for helping around the shop and writing a one-page autobiography.
Archival Media, Photos & Clippings
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