Shakespeare and Company

April 25th, 2025 Well. it’s not every bookstore that you have to queue up to get into. Here you can even see people waiting to see whether they can be bothered to get onto the line. Shakespeare and Company an English-language bookstore at 37 rue de la Bûcherie in Paris, alongside the river just across from Notre Dame, is celebrating its 75th anniversary this year, and The Economist, no doubt behind a paywall, pays them tribute. An English language bookshop called Shakespeare and Company does in fact have a rather longer history in Paris, and it’s really that history that the current location is mining and which causes all the queueing. The original shop had been at 12 rue de l’Odéon from 1919 to 1941, and was a famous gathering place for writers such as Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, and Ezra Pound inter alia. Indeed Hemingway devotes a chapter to it in his A Moveable Feast: Sketches of the Author’s Life in Paris in the Twenties. Sylvia Beach, its…