Customers step up to keep famed Paris bookshop alive
Shakespeare and Company has been hit hard by pandemic
PARIS— Shakespeare and Company, the iconic Paris bookstore that published James Joyce’s “Ulysses” in 1922, has appealed to readers for support after pandemic-linked losses and France’s spring lockdown put the future of the iconic Left Bank institution in doubt.
The English- language bookshop on the Seine River sent a recent email to customers to inform them that it was facing “hard times” and to encourage them to buy a book.
“We’ve been (down) 80 per cent since the first confinement in March, so at this point we’ve used all our savings,” Sylvia Whitman, daughter of the late proprietor George Whitman, told The Associated Press. Paris entered a fresh lockdown on Oct. 30 that saw all non-essential stores shuttered for the sec
ond time in seven months.
Since then, Whitman says she has been “overwhelmed” by the offers of help Shakespeare and Company has received. There were a record-breaking 5,000 online orders in one week, compared with around 100 in a normal week — representing a 50fold increase.
Support has come from all walks of life: from lowly stu
dents to former French President François Hollande, who dropped by the bookshop overlooking Notre Dame Cathedral before the lockdown in response to the appeal.
Many Parisians contacted Whitman to donate to the bookshop — without wishing to purchase a book — and to share memories of falling in love there or even sleeping among its bookshelves.
“(My father) let people sleep in the bookshop and called them ‘tumbleweeds.’ We’ve had 30,000 people sleep in the bookshop,” Whitman said, adding that it was one way the shop founders encouraged writers to be creative. Indeed, the motto on the shop wall reads: “Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise.”
The outpouring of loyalty is perhaps unsurprising for the place often described as the world’s most famous independent bookshop.
Founded by Sylvia Beach in 1919, Shakespeare and Company became a creative hub for expatriate writers including Ernest Hemingway, T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald and James Joyce.
“They all used her bookshop as a sanctuary,” Whitman said.
During the Second World War, as the shop’s story goes, Beach closed Shakespeare and Company in 1941 after refusing to sell her last copy of Joyce’s “Finnegans Wake” to a German
Nazi officer. The bookstore reopened in a different guise in 1951, with a new address and owner: George Whitman. The rest is history.
Since the email appeal, it’s not only Whitman’s daughter who has been overwhelmed. Shakespeare and Company’s website, run by a small team, has been overloaded with book orders and donations.
At several points in an interview, Shakespeare and Company’s resident dog, appropriately named Colette, interrupted with barking. Whitman said it was because Colette had a strong opinion on certain matters.
Shakespeare and Company’s financial troubles didn’t begin with the coronavirus pandemic. Paris in recent years has been a theatre of calamities that caused lasting problems for small shops and businesses that rely on out-of-town visitors — from terrorist attacks and antigovernment protests to the devastating April 2019 fire that closed Notre Dame Cathedral.