Shakespeare and Company

English-language bookshop at 37 rue de la Bûcherie on the Left Bank of Paris, facing Notre-Dame; opened by George Whitman in 1951.

At a glance

Source	Author	Role	In one line
Neither Here Nor There	Bill Bryson	backdrop	A cobwebbed bookshop full of readers who never buy, and a miracle that it survives such rents.

Neither Here Nor There — Bill Bryson (1991)

Source: Readwise highlight

Shakespeare & Co., a wonderfully gloomy English-language bookstore full of cobwebs and musty smells and old forgotten novels by writers like Warwick Deeping.

• Role: backdrop
• In the book: After dinner on his first night, Bryson crosses the river to the shop. Young people in “intellectual-looking glasses” lie curled in sagging chairs reading the stock cover to cover, and the man at the till barely has to look up from his own book. Bryson wonders how it pays a rent “on the banks of the Seine in the very shadow of Notre-Dame.”
• Why it matters: A small scene, but he holds it up as the alternative to the souvenir shops and rip-off cafés that would fill the site anywhere else. Its survival leaves him thinking “Paris was a very fine place indeed.”