“Books bring us places” is usually a figurative phrase. But two books I read in the last year literally brought me to the Shakespeare and Company bookstore located in Paris’s 5th Arrondissement last summer.
We happened to be staying across the street in a rental I can only describe as très charmant. And by “happened to be” I mean the bookstore was an important factor when my husband Sean made our reservation. (He has a history of surprising me with bookstores on our international travels.) I’ll describe the experience of visiting the bookstore, but first let’s look at the books that brought me there.
The first book is The Paris Bookseller by Kerri Maher. This historical fiction novel follows the life of American Sylvia Beach, who moved to Paris in 1916 and later opened Shakespeare and Company, an English language bookstore with her partner Adrienne Monnier.
The bookstore was remarkable for many reasons, namely for attracting a variety of authors to hang out among its stacks, including Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerard. But most notable is Shakespeare and Company’s publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922. The book outlines how Beach provided a vibrant space for writers of that time, her tumultuous working relationship with Joyce, and the eventual closure of the bookstore in 1941 during the German occupation of France.
Yes, the bookstore I visited was not the original Shakespeare and Company location, which brings me to the second book that brought me there: The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl. This novel set in the early 1980s follows young American Stella as she follows the directive of her once-estranged and now-departed mother: “Go to Paris,” accompanied with a one-way ticket.
Reichl is food writer, editor, and restaurant critic, which makes this book especially delicious as she details Stella’s coming-of-age in the culinary world. But central to the book’s plot is Stella’s residence at Shakespeare and Company as one of its “Tumbleweeds.” (Tumbleweeds were aspiring writers and other creatives permitted to sleep amongst the bookshelves in exchange for work around the store.) George Whitman opened the left-bank bookstore in 1951 first named Le Mistral, and re-named the store Shakespeare and Company in 1964 in honor of Sylvia Beach.
Visiting Shakespeare and Company now is a mixed bookbag of sorts. On the one hand, stepping through the doorway is a portal to an illustrious history of books and writers and dreamers. But the bookstore has transformed from a literary hub to a constant stream of tourists lining up throughout the day for a chance to look around. We were there during a Paris heatwave, yet there was no way I was going to miss this opportunity. And so I queued up.
Perhaps the best decision the store made was to prohibit photography inside the premises. Otherwise, the Instagrammers would certainly have taken much longer looking at the titles, or more aptly looking at themselves looking at the titles. But I was glad also to have this encouragement, to take in the sights of crowded bookshelves and imagine Tumbleweeds walking amongst them.
I ended up buying two books that day: Nora Ephron’s I Remember Nothing and Stephanie Danier’s Sweetbitter. Not purchases I was over the moon about, but actually sifting through the titles was difficult due to the crowds. In all, I am glad to have made the visit. But you know what they say about a book being better than a movie? In this case, The Paris Bookseller and The Paris Novel transported me to times and places that were perhaps even richer than the real thing.