Viator Viator Travel Blog

In the last century Paris drew writers like moths to a flame. Ernest Hemingway fictionalised just about everybody he knew in 1920s Paris in the pages of A Moveable Feast. George Orwell published an entire book’s worth of anecdotes in Down and Out in Paris and London. And you can read about Paul Auster’s “starving writer in Paris” years in Hand to Mouth, which is also an excellent exploration of the compulsion to write.

Shakespeare & Co., Paris

There’s still a hangover from those earlier times: Paris still pulls in aspiring authors, often to the bookshop Shakespeare & Company, perched between cafes on the Left Bank of the Seine. George Whitman opened Shakespeare & Company in the 1950s and it became a regular hangout for beat writers Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and William Burroughs. (George still lives above the shop in an apartment crammed with books, photographs and memorabilia.)

Back then writers could stay at George’s apartment on condition that they typed out an autobiography on the shop’s battered old typewriter and handed it to George by midnight. Kerouac stayed there before writing Satori in Paris. Burroughs researched Naked Lunch in the shop. Ginsberg gave poetry readings there.

George has a wicked sense of humour and likes to kid people that he’s descended from the poet Walt Whitman. He’s a grizzled and anarchic 93 years old now, who still looks very beatnik with his wild hair and dandy shirts, and calls himself the ‘Don Quixote of the Latin Quarter’. These days his daughter Sylvia handles the day-to-day running of the place. The torch is being handed on, so to speak.

The shop itself is a small warren of uneven bookshelves, over-loaded and warped with time, a maze of step ladders, cinema aisle seats, even a piano (a sign reads, “Please play the piano”). Past the wishing well and up the stairs at the back there’s a writer’s cubby-hole complete with typewriter and usually someone clacking away at it. There’s a library, too, that’s more of a place to hang out and meet people. And there are even beds between the bookshelves – for the twenty-somethings who work and sleep there.

…lest they be angels in disguise

It’s a strange mix of public and private, an invitation to break the social boundaries we don’t normally dare cross. Is it a shop or a home, or both? Painted on the wall is the slogan “Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise.”

George, who’s known so many writers since he arrived just after World War II, looked back to an earlier generation of ex-pats and the original Shakespeare & Company at 12, rue de l’Odeon. That was the shop that published James Joyce’s Ulysses and belonged to Sylvia Beach, an American who gathered together Anglophone writers in the 1920s and ’30s. She had to close during the Nazi occupation but she passed the name on to George a decade later.

For almost six decades now George’s Shakespeare & Co. has run literary events. There are readings every Monday at 7pm, hosted by veteran journalist John Kirby Abraham, whose old-fashioned radio announcer accent gives you the feeling he’s speaking for the benefit of the listeners at home.

Shakespeare & Co also organise literary festivals in the summer (travel writing last year, memoir & biography writing next) as well as celebrations of Bloom’s Day in honour of James Joyce.

And there are writing workshops where you can listen to new talent or get feedback on your own stuff, such as the drop-in “Other Writers’ Group” open to all every Saturday at 3pm. It’s a vibrant scene, a good community to plug into if you’re coming to Paris to write.

But the best thing is Sunday afternoon tea at 4, when, if the mood takes him, George opens his apartment-museum for a tea party to which the whole world is invited. You never know who you’re gonna meet; quite possibly some writer who stayed there back in the 1960s or ’70s. Like its owner, Shakespeare & Co is an oasis of individuality in a world of bland chain bookshops. This place has accumulated time and character while most other shops have been gutted and refitted and had their past annihilated. “One of the last real places in the world,” as a letter tacked to the wall has it.

Paris has several regular poetry nights in English – among them the monthly Live Poet’s Society at The Highlander pub and the fortnightly open mic night “Spoken Word” at The Lizard Lounge. If you crave a complete listing of literary events and creative writing courses in English, click here. So why not come and trace Paris’ literary history or find inspiration and support to write yourself? As Henry Miller said, the problem with Paris is not the lack of stimulation, but that there’s so much of it.

–David Barnes

Editor’s note: Shakespeare & Company is at 37 rue de la Bûcherie, Paris. Metro Saint Michel. If you’re planning a trip to Paris, be sure to browse Viator’s list of Paris tours and things to see and do.