ABSTRACT
On the southern quay of the Seine, the Rive gauche, directly opposite Notre Dame Cathedral, in a very early seventeenth-century former monastery, sits the English-language bookshop Shakespeare and Company, run by Sylvia Beach Whitman. She began learning the ropes as early as 2003 at age twenty-one, eventually taking over the shop in 2006 from her father, George Whitman, who founded the shop in 1951 and passed away at age ninety-eight in December 2011. The rue de la Bûcherie is one of the oldest streets on the Left Bank, serving in the Middle Ages as the location for the distribution of old, boiled meats to feed the poor. Despite the orthographical similarity to the French term boucherie for ‘butcher’, the small alley is actually named after its more ancient use as a port for setting logs in the River Seine (from bûche meaning ‘log’). According to Sylvia Whitman, the building that houses Shakespeare and Company was constructed around the time of Shakespeare’s Tempest (roughly 1610). This past serves as a metaphor not only for the longstanding reputation of the shop itself but also of its many transformations: it is an island refuge withstanding storms of commercial and cultural change.
