Struggling writers and ‘socialist utopia’: The story behind the ramshackle Paris bookshop beloved by Hemingway

Shakespeare and Company is now a multimillion euro business with financial benefactors all over the world, but it hasn’t lost its mystical charm, writes Peter Allen

Shakespeare and Company has come far since its ‘squalid’ beginnings (Peter Allen/The Independent )

The myth of an impoverished but magical Paris bookshop is one that has served Shakespeare and Company very well over the last century.   

Its American founder, Sylvia Beach, opened the doors in 1919, and was soon handing out cash loans she could ill afford to struggling writers like James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway. There was no inside toilet, and only basic heating in cramped premises close to the Odeon Theatre. Flea market armchairs were provided for undernourished visitors to flop, talk and edit among the collapsing shelves and cockroaches.  

Despite the squalor, Beach used her connections to get the first thousand copies of Joyce’s Ulysses out in time for 2 February 1922 – the author’s 40th birthday – and did not regret an outlay that threatened her with bankruptcy.  She wrote in her memoirs: “It seemed natural to me that the efforts and sacrifices on my part should be proportionate to the greatness of the work I was publishing.”