Shakespeare and Company (bookstore)

The English-language bookshop facing Notre-Dame across the river

Area Latin Quarter
Type Shopping
Time needed 30m

Shakespeare and Company (bookstore) — Photograph: Photograph by Mike Peel (www.mikepeel.net). / CC BY-SA 4.0

Shakespeare and Company is an English-language bookshop at 37 rue de la Bucherie, on the Left Bank directly across the river from Notre-Dame. The present shop was opened in 1951 by George Whitman, who took the name of Sylvia Beach's earlier 1920s shop on rue de l'Odeon. It is a working bookshop first and a literary landmark second, and it is very small for the number of people who want to be in it.

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Getting there

The nearest Metro is Saint-Michel on line 4, or Saint-Michel-Notre-Dame for RER B and RER C, both about two minutes on foot. From Chatelet it is one stop on line 4, or barely fifteen minutes to walk along the quais. Cluny-La Sorbonne on line 10 and Maubert-Mutualite on line 10 are each five to eight minutes away. The shop sits on a short pedestrian street between the quai de Montebello and rue Saint-Jacques; walk the riverside and turn in at the green frontage.

What you see

The ground floor is two narrow connected rooms, floor to ceiling in new fiction, poetry and Paris writing, with a low doorway between them that everyone stoops through. The staircase at the back is steep and single-file and leads to a first floor of secondhand and reference shelves, a piano, a children's alcove and the wish well where readers drop notes. Benches and daybeds are tucked between the stacks and are usually occupied. Books bought here are stamped at the till with the shop's Shakespeare device, which is the thing most people actually come away with. The cafe is a separate door a few metres along the same street.

What to pair it with

Notre-Dame and the Ile de la Cite are across the bridge. The Musee de Cluny is a ten-minute walk up through the Latin Quarter, and the Pantheon and the Jardin du Luxembourg are both within twenty minutes on foot.

When to go

Earliest opening on a weekday is the only reliably calm time; from late morning onwards there is a queue along the pavement and a one-in-one-out rhythm in high season. Weekend afternoons and the whole of July and August are the worst. Late afternoon light on the quai outside is good for the facade, which is where most photographs are taken anyway.

What is hard about it

Photography inside is not allowed and staff will ask you to put the phone away, so the interior is something you look at rather than record. The queue outside can run to half an hour in summer for a shop you can cross in twenty paces, and once in, the aisles are too tight to browse comfortably with a bag or a pushchair. The upstairs stairs are narrow, steep and not usable with a wheelchair. Prices are normal retail, not bargain, and the reading rooms are not a place to sit for long when it is busy.

Common questions

How long do you need at Shakespeare and Company?

Twenty to forty minutes inside is plenty, plus whatever the queue costs you. Allow an hour in total in summer.

Can you take photos inside the shop?

No. Photography is not permitted in the interior, though the painted shopfront outside is fair game and is what most visitors photograph.

Is this the original 1920s shop?

No. Sylvia Beach's shop, which published Ulysses, was on rue de l'Odeon and closed in 1941; this one took the name in the 1960s and is a separate business in a different building.