Shakespeare and Company

Sir, – In her stroll around Paris, Gemma Tipton sits outside Shakespeare and Company, which she describes as "the bookstore made famous as the haunt of James Joyce, and as the publisher of his Ulysses" ("Paris is not the place for quirky design" , March 26th).

This is a common misperception. The site of Shakespeare and Company where Sylvia Beach published Ulysses in 1922 is at 12 rue de l'Odéon, as a plaque attests. This shop closed in 1940. The bookshop that Tipton refers to was originally called Le Mistral. George Whitman opened it in 1951 and changed the name to Shakespeare and Company in 1964, in homage to Sylvia Beach.

It is a wonderful bookshop with traditions of its own, but it was never the haunt of Joyce, Hemingway, Fitzgerald and other luminaries of the 1920s. – Yours, etc,

JEAN O’SULLIVAN,

READ MORE

Paris.