Few names loom larger in Paris’s literary imagination than Shakespeare and Company. In the bookish nooks of this Left Bank store, writing careers have been forged, romances ignited and wide-eyed tourists introduced to something of la vie bohème.
A decade ago, when I began visiting my new boyfriend (now husband) in Paris, he wooed me in the piano room of the grotto-like store, where hardback biographies are stacked like the Manhattan skyline and shop tabby Aggie is often to be found curled up in a warm spot behind the door.
On the recommendation of one of the shop’s enthusiastic young staff we would buy novels, English originals, or translations of French books. Then we would stroll along the Quai de Montebello, fancying ourselves as F Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald (they were part of the scene at Shakespeare and Company in the 1920s). Or we might while away afternoons in the shop’s first-floor library, where books are famously not for sale and there are views through cracked windows of Notre Dame framed by cherry trees. It seemed like the vestige of an older Paris; a Paris that always put art above profit.
Sadly, like many of Europe’s cultural institutions, Shakespeare and Company is now under threat. Even before “reconfinement”, as Parisians politely term their second Covid lockdown, the store’s sales had fallen by 80 per cent. In October Shakespeare and Company began selling books online, with staff turning the shop’s poetry room into a book-packing production line for the first time in its 100-year history. The shop has had to pause to catch up with orders, but will resume selling online on December 1.
“It’s been so sad,” says Krista Halverson, director of Shakespeare and Company’s publishing arm, of the shop’s eerily quiet aisles. “We’re used to throngs of tourists popping in to buy A Moveable Feast.” Ernest Hemingway’s memoir of his time in Paris mentions the shop and is one of its bestsellers. “It feels as if a shadow has eclipsed us.”
Advertisement
Founded in 1919 by the modernist publisher Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company moved from Saint-Germain to its current Seine-side location in 1951, under the ownership and management of shock-haired American eccentric George Whitman, who sought to build a shop that was akin to “a book that leads into a magical world in the imagination”.
William Burroughs researched The Naked Lunch in Shakespeare and Company’s ancient medical tomes; fellow beats Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso stripped naked for a 1958 poetry recital; and Anaïs Nin swigged bordeaux from the bottle at the 1974 launch of her memoir.
Since the 1950s, Shakespeare and Company has played host to the aspiring young writers Whitman dubbed the “tumbleweeds”, who are invited to sleep on makeshift beds erected on its bookshelves, borrow freely from its library and pay their keep by manning the tills.
In 2014, Alex Christofi spent two weeks sleeping on a shelf in Shakespeare and Company’s non-fiction section, researching his Paris-set novel Let Us Be True.
“I loved that they made room for young waifs and strays like me who wanted to be part of the literary world,” he says. “I had a lovely time there with the other tumbleweeds: a young Portuguese poet, Americans steeped in Kerouac. We drank wine and ate cheese into the small hours, then we’d get up before 8am, woolly-headed, to clear away our beds for the day’s book trade.”
Advertisement
Canadian author Jeremy Mercer lived at the shop for five months in the late 1990s and has fond memories of being taken to Latin Quarter restaurants by Whitman, the latter’s pockets packed with camera film containers filled with vodka. “He taught us that by living cheaply and celebrating life we’d know true freedom,” he recalls. “The shop fostered a creative imagination in young travellers like me.”
Now, finding that it can’t compete with the Amazon behemoth, Shakespeare and Company is launching a membership scheme inspired by a ruse that got the shop through the 1930s Great Depression. “TS Eliot and Hemingway were members of that first scheme,” Halverson explains. “In fact, Hemingway overcame his famous reluctance to joining clubs and was a founder ‘friend’, just to keep us going.”
With membership from £41 a year, today’s friends of Shakespeare and Company will get a monthly serving of original digital content, including book readings by notable actors and original pieces by literary supporters such as Dave Eggers.
Jeanette Winterson is the co-author of a book about the history and cultural significance of the store, and says its loss would leave more than a void on the Parisian tourist map. “Young and old, visitors and Parisians, readers and non-readers have found common ground at Shakespeare and Company for so many years: not only through books, but through its values,” she says. “I’d urge all who care about the life of the mind to support it.”
Halverson recalls that George Whitman, who died in 2011 at the age of 98 and whose daughter Sylvia now runs the store, used to liken himself to the lamplighters who illuminated the streets of the Medieval Rive Gauche. “ ‘I’m just a frère lampier,’ he’d tell us, referring to his role in keeping Paris’s literary light alive. Now it’s up to us to ensure that light isn’t extinguished.”
Sally Howard
How can I help?
Advertisement
Find out more about membership at friendsofshakespeareandcompany.com and order books (from December 1) at shakespeareandcompany.com.
Stanfords is the place to get the travel juices flowing
The 14:31 Eurostar slid out from the iron ribcage of St Pancras station. Opening my notebook, I logged my departure — the first of many — then marked the page with its black ribbon, lifting the book to breathe in the leather smell.
That morning I’d dashed to Stanfords in Covent Garden to buy a diary that would eventually become my book Around the World in 80 Trains. When I first researched the idea, it didn’t occur to me to start anywhere but Stanfords.
For hours I paced around glowing globes, trawled through guides and travelogues, and pored over maps with Martin Greenaway, the shop’s resident cartographer. Once home, I stuck a world map on the wall and peppered it with pins, tying string from one to the next, watching my route unfold.
So it was with sadness that I read of Stanfords’ struggles to stay afloat during the pandemic. While many independent bookshops have suffered a loss from in-store sales, this travel specialist has been left particularly vulnerable.
Advertisement
Although some members of staff were furloughed, it wasn’t enough. Now the owners have launched a crowdfunding scheme with a target of £120,000 to help pay staff, improve the website, and make the shop Covid-secure. Some donations will attract rewards — for £5, you can claim five hot drinks at the shop’s café once it reopens — but others are all about the altruism.
With its enormous collection of books, maps and travel-themed games and gifts, Stanfords has long been the go-to for keen travellers, amateur and professional, holidaymaker and explorer. I am certainly not the only travel writer to begin their journeys among Stanfords’ shelves.
In the opening pages of In Xanadu, William Dalrymple describes a new set of maps that “looked as though they had been prepared by the CIA”. “We got them from Stanfords,” he says. “The Karakoram Highway had recently re-opened and it was the only place in Europe where I could get them.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by the author Dervla Murphy, who says: “I’m horrified to hear of the possible closure of Stanfords. For the past 60 years it has been a crucially important part of preparing for my journeys.”
Set up in 1853 by Edward Stanford, the shop began as a cartographical publisher, expanding only later into retail. “Ordnance Survey maps were originally funded and developed as military mapping, not for civilian purposes, but Stanfords was commissioned by government departments to create and print them,” says Giles Stanford, Edward’s great-great grandson. “I remember Dad saying that just before the Falklands War the Foreign Office came to the shop and asked for maps of the Falkland Islands. They couldn’t get their hands on one anywhere else.”
Advertisement
Michael Palin, one of travel’s most beloved figures, tells me: “I frequently bought the world there, in the form of their trusty inflatable globes, which I’ve blown up and left in places as far apart as North Korea and rural Kenya. Stanfords is the place to get the travel juices flowing.”
The day before the second lockdown I stopped by to top up my own travel juices. At the shop’s current premises, a cosy nook on Covent Garden’s Mercer Walk, I stepped into a world that caused instant pangs of wanderlust. The shelves were shining with hardbacks on hiking and cycling. There were Persian cookery books and Booker-winning novels; hammam beach towels and a box of cards that teach you to swear around the world. I was filled with a sense of hope that one day the world will be set to right. It will be all the brighter if we still have Stanfords.
Monisha Rajesh
How can I help?
Order books from stanfords.co.uk and join the crowdfunding effort at payitforward.london.gov.uk/support-stanfords
Essential travel reads
Jude Brosnan of Stanfords recommends:
Red Sands by Caroline Eden
A reimagining of traditional travel writing using food as the jumping-off point to explore central Asia.
Wanderland by Jini Reddy
Delving into the “wanderlands” of Britain, Reddy heads off in search of the magical in the landscape.
A Lady’s Life in the Rocky Mountains by Isabella Bird
One of Stanfords’ Travel Classics, this is a compilation of letters written by Bird to her sister, Henrietta, in 1873 during a solo adventure in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado.
