Shakespeare and Company (bookstore)

Shakespeare & Company (often abbreviated Shakespeare & Co.) is the name of two well-known and literary history major bookstores in Paris.

The original Shakespeare & Company

The American Sylvia Beach opened in 1919 in the Rue de l' Odéon in relation to the literary bookstore of their ( future ) partner Adrienne Monnier the bookstore Shakespeare & Company for English-language books. The bookstore was a meeting place for writers of the Lost Generation - among them Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce and TS Eliot. At the latest by the publication of Ulysses work by Sylvia Beach of Shakespeare & Company became famous.

After the occupation of Paris by Germany in World War II Beach closed within hours of the business, in order to avoid looting or expropriation, after they had refused a German officer their copy of Finnegans Wake to sell. However, the symbolic liberation by U.S. troops Ernest Hemingway in 1944 was not followed by re-opening.

The second Shakespeare & Company

After Beach's death the American George Whitman (1913-2011) named his bookstore founded in 1951, Le Mistral in the Rue de la Bûcherie 1962 to her honor in Shakespeare and Company. The bookstore was in the 1950s and 1960s, becoming the focal point of the Beat Generation. Writers such as Allen Ginsberg, Lawrence Ferlinghetti and William S. Burroughs met here, Henry Miller was a regular customer. Currently, the bookstore of George Whitman's daughter Sylvia Beach Whitman is performed.

Trivia

In the American movie Before Sunset (2004) Jesse and Celine meet in the bookstore again after Celine learned from the newspaper that there Jesse holds a reading. Also for Woody Allen's film Midnight in Paris and Spike Jonze animated short Mourir auprès de toi (both 2011) served as the bookstore location.