Shakespeare and Company bookstore, Paris

Two bookshops, one name

There have been two Shakespeare and Companys. The first, open from 1919 to 1941, moved from rue Dupuytren to the rue de l’Odéon and published Ulysses. The present shop, at 37 rue de la Bûcherie, opened in 1951 as Le Mistral and was renamed in 1964 for the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s birth. It is an English-language bookshop with a separate antiquarian room, and opened its café in 2015 next door.

Photo: Mike Peel, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The shop faces Notre-Dame; the nearest metro station is under 200 metres away, and the cathedral forecourt is about 120 metres from the shop. The bookshop itself calls its address “Kilometer Zero”, the starting point of the roads of France; the official zero marker is in fact on the cathedral forecourt, which makes this a bookseller’s phrase rather than a surveyor’s.

What to plan

• Go early, or on a weekday. The shop admits a limited number of people, so queues form at busy times.
• Take a small bag. Anything over 40 cm is refused, and there is no left-luggage.
• Check the events page. Free readings fill quickly.
• Mind the three rooms. The bookshop, the antiquarian room and the café keep different hours.

Photo: Shadowgate, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Around the bookshop

The bouquinistes along the quays and Notre-Dame, whose forecourt is about 120 metres away, are the natural next stops; for the lanes behind, see the rue de la Huchette and our list of literary cafés. The Latin Quarter guide places the shop in the wider district.

Photo: Benh LIEU SONG, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Getting there

The RER B and C platforms of Saint-Michel – Notre-Dame are about 169 metres from the door, which is a walk of about 3 minutes by our method (the straight line multiplied by 1.3, at 80 metres a minute). Cité (line 4) is 261 metres away, Cluny – La Sorbonne (line 10) 269 and Maubert – Mutualité (line 10) 289. The nearest of them, with line 4 shut at Saint-Michel until 19 December 2026, is therefore the RER station, or Cité on the other side of the river.

Choosing your moment

The week has no closing day, but the three parts of the shop keep different hours. The bookshop closes at 8 p.m. from Monday to Wednesday and at 9 p.m. from Thursday to Saturday, and on Sunday it opens only at noon. The antiquarian room closes for an hour at midday, and the café, open every day from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m., is the one with the longest day. The shop closes on some public holidays. On event evenings it can close early.

Because admission is limited and a queue forms at busy hours, the shop’s own advice is to come early or on a weekday.

Inside

• The antiquarian room. A separate section of old books, open Monday to Saturday from 11 a.m. and Sunday from noon, with its midday break.
• The reading library. According to Wikipedia, a reading library upstairs is open to visitors free of charge.
• The beds. About 30,000 writers and artists passing through, the “Tumbleweeds”, have slept among the shelves since opening, and are asked in return to read a book a day, to help in the shop for a few hours and to write a one-page autobiography. Today the programme takes about twenty people a year.
• The motto. The shop front carries “Be not inhospitable to strangers lest they be angels in disguise”.

The building in the rue de la Bûcherie dates from the early seventeenth century, and was a monastery called “La Maison du Mustier”, according to the bookshop.

On screen

The shop appears in Richard Linklater’s Before Sunset (2004) and in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris (2011), according to the data we hold. The shop asks visitors not to photograph or film inside, so any picture has to be taken at the door.

Combining it with

From the door, in a straight line; times follow our method.

Place	Distance	On foot
Rue de la Huchette	113 m	2 min
Notre-Dame	139 m	2 min
Saint-Séverin	172 m	3 min
Cluny Museum	365 m	6 min
Sorbonne	387 m	6 min
Saint-Étienne-du-Mont	652 m	11 min
Panthéon	746 m	12 min

Three of our guides, the rue de la Huchette, Notre-Dame and Saint-Séverin, lie within 175 metres of the shop.

Hotels beside the bookshop

Measured in a straight line from 37 rue de la Bûcherie, these are the seven closest hotels of our database, each with a page of its own.

• Hôtel Esmeralda, one star, about 11 metres.
• Hôtel Notre Dame Saint-Michel, three stars, about 60 metres.
• Hôtel Henri IV Rive Gauche, three stars, about 100 metres.
• Les Rives de Notre Dame, four stars, about 120 metres.
• Maison Colbert Meliá Collection, five stars, about 160 metres.
• Hôtel Mont-Blanc, two stars, about 165 metres.
• Hôtel Albe Saint-Michel, three stars, about 180 metres.

Stars are the Atout France classification as recorded in our database. For the full comparison, see our list of hotels near Notre-Dame and of hotels near Saint-Michel.