Sylvia Beach opened her English-language bookshop and lending library, Shakespeare and Company, at 8 rue Dupuytren in Paris on November 19, 1919.
On November 19, 1919, Sylvia Beach opened Shakespeare and Company, an English-language bookshop and lending library, at 8 rue Dupuytren on the Left Bank of Paris. She used a small inheritance and encouragement from Adrienne Monnier, a French bookseller who would become her lifelong partner, to fund the venture.
The shop quickly became the epicenter of the Lost Generation and Anglo-American modernist literary scene in Paris. Writers such as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, and T.S. Eliot frequented the shop, borrowing books, receiving mail, and socializing. In 1921 the shop relocated to a larger space at 12 rue de l'Odéon, closer to Monnier's own bookshop.
Shakespeare and Company was far more than a retail establishment; it functioned as a literary salon, lending library, informal post office, and financial lifeline for struggling expatriate writers. Beach extended credit generously and often supported penniless authors from her own limited funds.
This bookshop's founding is historically significant as one of the first English-language bookstores in continental Europe and became legendary as the nerve center of literary modernism between the two World Wars, cementing Beach's reputation as one of the most important patrons and facilitators of twentieth-century literature.