Jessica Welch

Paris Abroad Trip 2017

Julie Kerr-Berry
4/11/17

Historical Site Analysis- Shakespeare and Company

The Shakespeare and Company bookstore, located on the Ile de Cite across

the street from Notre Dame Cathedral boasts a large collection of popular modern

day texts ranging from the fantasy of Harry Potter to the works of leading political

and economic experts. However, this shop also boasts a large variety of older

works, including the Holy Bible, Shakespearian Plays (for which the shop is named,

and many works of famous patrons. These patrons include Hemingway, Joyce,

Pound, and Fitzgerald. The store however, has a very rich history, so the

Shakespeare and Company Hemingway often refers to in his Auto-biographical work

The Moveable Feast in which he recounts his years living in the city.

The first Shakespeare and Company was founded by a woman by the name of

Sylvia Beach in 1919 and ran until 1941 when the Nazis occupied Paris. While the

store was open however, the store was used as a partial home, postal, and loan

service to wayward and starving writers who could borrow books from the upstairs

library. Hemingway comments multiple times about money loaned to him by Beach,

who never required regular payments for her loans. He also mentions that much of

his mail was sent to her store as he had to move multiple times. The tore closed in

1941 when a Nazi Soldier demanded that Beach sell him the last copy of Finnegans

Wake. When she refused, the soldier stated that he would be back to claim all her

goods and close the store. Beach stored the books in the upstairs apartment
immediately. She spent six months in an internment camp following this event, but

was never able to reopen her store. She died in 1962 in Paris.

The founder of the modern Shakespeare and Company Bookshop is a man by

the name of George Whitman. Constructed in the seventeenth Century, the building

was once a monastery built on Kilometer Zero. The original name of Whitmans

store was La Mistral, but changed in Aril of 1964. This date marks the 400 th

anniversary of William Shakespeare; however, he salon named the store

Shakespeare and Company to honor Sylvia Beach who died two years prior. His

dream was to keep the integrity of Beachs original bookstore alive in his own, and

due to that, the store soon became the center for literary activity in the city. Today

the store functions as an English speaking bookstore and meeting place for

wayward writers, now known as Tumbleweeds. Writers can stay indefinitely at the

bookstore, sleeping on bunks that function as benches during the day on three

conditions; they read a book a day, they help with the shop for a few hours a day,

and if they write a one page auto-biography. These auto-biographies are kept in a

large archive which contains the stories, lives, and dreams of these Tumbleweed

Writers. Though George Whitman died in 2011, his daughter, rightfully named

Sylvia, still runs the store splendidly.