Shakespeare and Company, Paris

Shakespeare and Company is a bookshop with sleeping places hidden among its shelves, where aspiring writers and artists have stayed while helping with the work of the store. Since 1951, more than 30,000 people have slept in those beds. This unusual hospitality belongs to the English-language bookshop opened by American bookseller George Whitman on Paris’s Left Bank in 1951.

The shop occupies 37 rue de la Bûcherie, in the 5th arrondissement, and sells new books, used books, and antiquarian volumes. It also offers a public reading library. Look at the entrance to that library for the motto written above it: “Be Not Inhospitable to Strangers Lest They Be Angels in Disguise”.

Whitman began the business under another name, Le Mistral, then adopted Shakespeare and Company in 1964. He chose the name as a tribute to Sylvia Beach’s earlier bookshop, which opened on the Left Bank in 1919 and closed in 1941. The present shop carries that literary lineage into its rooms: guests known as “Tumbleweeds” help in the store, read a book each day, and leave a brief autobiography for its archives. George Whitman’s daughter Sylvia now runs the bookshop, continuing the welcoming, writer-centred spirit that makes this cramped interior feel like both a shop and a refuge.