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There are no Shakespeare and Company equivalents in any other city. Britain’s capital has the London Review Bookshop, its tote bags beloved by fashionable kids in Seoul, but the clientele just want to visit a well-stocked bookshop. None of the bookshops in London are so deeply stitched into the mythos of the city that they have become part of any presumed sightseeing tour, alongside Big Ben, Westminster Abbey and Buckingham Palace. None have become an attraction for those otherwise uninterested in the literary landscape of their holiday destination.

There’s the fact that the shop itself is beautiful: the dark wood, creaking like a ship, low-hanging absinthe-coloured lanterns giving off a dim, gold light. Its slight disorderliness – books stacked on the floor, wedged in too-small gaps on shelves, rested in the rungs of ladders – is undeniably attractive in a world where the majority of our novels are bought on the recommendation of an algorithm on a clean, white website. And its location is perfect too, allowing it to claim some of the long-dissipated bohemian charm left over by the artists and intellectuals of the old Rive Gauche, while being a quick walk from tourist favourites. And there is the much vaunted novelty that aspiring writers can stay in the shop for free; called “Tumbleweeds”, the travellers must help out with a few hours’ work, read a book a day and write a short autobiography.

But much of Shakespeare and Company’s tourist-drawing power comes from its glamorous history. The original shop was founded by Sylvia Beach, one of many American expats after the first world war drawn by the lure of Parisian life and the declining value of the franc. Beach’s life story is inextricable from that of Shakespeare and Company. She and her long-term partner, bookshop owner Adrienne Monnier, opened the shop in Paris in 1919. It was immediately frequented by the stars of the French literary scene, such as Valery Larbaud and Jules Romains. Ezra Pound soon followed. Then TS Eliot, Djuna Barnes, Fitzgerald (“one of our great pals”, Beach called him, musing on his “blue eyes and good looks”), Joyce, Hemingway.
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Hemingway and Joyce are the stars of this fabled milieu. In addition to bookselling, Beach was a publisher. In 1922, she published Ulysses in English for the first time, printing 1,000 numbered copies on handmade paper. (Joyce sold Ulysses to a different publisher soon after, nearly bankrupting Beach, which only adds to the drama.) It was supposedly Beach’s refusal to sell her last copy of Finnegans Wake to a German soldier in Vichy France that led to her closing the shop – the soldier threatened to confiscate her books, which were hidden on the fourth floor. She comforted American soldiers being sheltered by the French resistance, hid Arthur Koestler in her attic from the Nazis, and was interned in a camp for her anti-fascist sentiments.
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