Shakespeare and Company

What it is

Shakespeare and Company is an independent English-language bookshop at 37 rue de la Bûcherie on the Left Bank, facing Notre-Dame across the Seine. George Whitman, an American expatriate who had settled in Paris after the Second World War, opened it in 1951 under the name Le Mistral and renamed it Shakespeare and Company in 1964, in tribute to the earlier shop of that name Sylvia Beach ran nearby from 1919 until the Nazi occupation closed it in 1941 — the shop that first published James Joyce's Ulysses in 1922 when no mainstream publisher in Britain or America would touch it.

Whitman ran the shop for decades as both a bookshop and an informal boarding house for young writers passing through Paris, part of a self-image he cultivated as a spiritual heir to Beach's project even though the two shops were never legally connected. This is a shop, not a museum: it sells books, and the literary weight it carries comes from who has slept and written there over more than seventy years, not from an exhibit behind glass.

After Whitman's death in 2011, the shop passed to his daughter, Sylvia Beach Whitman — named for Beach herself — who has kept both the bookselling and the tumbleweed tradition running while modernising the shop's back-office operations and adding the café next door.

Checked 2026-08-24 · Source

What's inside

The ground floor holds new and secondhand English-language titles arranged by section, with staff picks and small-press work mixed among them, and a rotating display of the shop's own small imprint alongside mainstream publishers. A narrow, uneven staircase leads to an upper floor built around a reading library, a piano, a wishing well set into the floorboards, and a rare-book room holding older and antiquarian stock kept apart from the browsing shelves below.

That upper floor is also where the shop's "tumbleweeds" sleep — writers and readers who stay for free among the shelves in exchange for a few hours' work in the shop each day, reading a book, and writing a one-page autobiography for the shop's files, a practice George Whitman started decades ago and his daughter Sylvia Beach Whitman has continued since taking over day-to-day management in the 2000s and then the shop outright after his death in 2011. Estimates of how many tumbleweeds have passed through over the decades run into the tens of thousands, though no official running count is published. A café was added next door in 2015, serving coffee and pastries separately from the bookshop itself, with its own till and staff distinct from the book side.

Checked 2026-08-24 · Source

How long to spend

Thirty to forty-five minutes covers a browse of both floors; readers who settle into the upstairs library often stay longer, and a slow Sunday-morning visit before the crowds arrive can easily stretch past an hour. The adjoining café adds another twenty to thirty minutes if a stop there is part of the visit.

Checked 2026-08-24 · Source

Season and crowds

Weekday mornings are the quietest time to browse without a queue at the door. Weekend afternoons draw long lines, driven as much by the view of Notre-Dame from the doorway as by the books, especially through summer, when the surrounding quai fills with visitors heading to or from the cathedral itself.

Checked 2026-08-24 · Source

Tickets

There is no admission charge — it is a shop, and entry is free; the only cost is whatever is bought. Specific opening hours are not reproduced here beyond noting the shop is open daily, and hours can shift around public holidays like any independent business.

Checked 2026-08-24 · Source

Getting there

On the Left Bank a short walk from the river. Métro Saint-Michel or Cluny–La Sorbonne are both within easy walking distance along the quai, and the walk itself passes several other secondhand bookstalls that line the riverbank nearby, part of the wider tradition of riverside bookselling that predates the shop by centuries.

Checked 2026-08-24 · Source

What to watch out for

The stairs to the upper floor are narrow, steep and uneven, with no lift, which matters for anyone with mobility needs, and the shop has no straightforward step-free route around that. Photography is discouraged in the upstairs reading library out of respect for the tumbleweeds who live and write there, and staff will ask visitors to put a camera away if it strays into that space. On busy afternoons the shop limits how many people are inside at once to keep the narrow aisles passable, which can mean a short wait outside, particularly on weekend afternoons in the warmer months.

Checked 2026-08-24 · Source

Photography

The green shopfront with its gold lettering, and the view of Notre-Dame from directly outside the door, are the two shots most visitors leave with, and both work well in most light through the day. The upstairs library operates on an informal no-photography understanding.

Checked 2026-08-24 · Source

Where it is

• 45 min

  1 min walk · Paris 5e Arrondissement

  Robinier du Square Viviani

  • High
  • Historic monument
• 1 hour

  1 min walk · Paris 5e Arrondissement

  Square René-Viviani

  • Must see
  • Nature site
• 2 hours

  1 min walk · Paris 5e Arrondissement

  Aux Trois Mailletz

  • Notable
  • Nightlife venue

External links

• Official site
• +33 1 43 25 40 93
• View on Wikidata