Legendary bookstore + café hybrid; quiet nooks and literary ambiance ideal for focused work.

Tell us your story/detailed overview

Shakespeare and Company is an English-language bookshop in the heart of Paris, on the banks of the Seine, opposite Notre-Dame. Since opening in 1951, it’s been a meeting place for anglophone writers and readers, becoming a Left Bank literary institution. When the store first opened, it was called Le Mistral. George changed it to the present name in April 1964—on the four-hundredth anniversary of William Shakespeare’s birth—in honor of a bookseller he admired, Sylvia Beach, who’d founded the original Shakespeare and Company in 1919. Through his bookstore, George Whitman endeavored to carry on the spirit of Beach’s shop, and it quickly became a center for expat literary life in Paris. Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs, Anaïs Nin, Richard Wright, William Styron, Julio Cortázar, Henry Miller, William Saroyan, Lawrence Durrell, James Jones, and James Baldwin were among early visitors to the shop.

When open (hrs.)

Monday-Wednesday, 10 AM–8 PM Thursday-Friday, 10 AM–9 PM

Need To Know/Community Rules

Fika moments: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/events FAQs: https://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/prepare-your-visit