When I was 19 I was lucky enough to temporarily call Paris home. Making my local bookstore ‘Shakespeare and Company’.

The iconic bookstore quickly became one of my favourite haunts in Paris and is definitely worth a browse during any visit to the romantic city.

Shakespeare and Company lives on the banks of the Seine, opposite Notre-Dame and dates back to 1951. The bookshop has a rich artistic history and was even a spot where writers, artists, and intellectuals were invited to sleep among the shop’s shelves and piles of books, on small beds that doubled as benches during the day. An estimated 30,000 young and young-at-heart writers and artists have stayed in the bookshop, including then unknowns such as Alan Sillitoe, Robert Stone, Kate Grenville, Sebastian Barry, Ethan Hawke, Jeet Thayil, Darren Aronfsky, Geoffrey Rush, and David Rakoff.

These guests are called Tumbleweeds after the rolling thistles that “drift in and out with the winds of chance,” as George described. A sense of community and commune was very important to him—he referred to his shop as a “socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore.”

Three things are asked of each Tumbleweed: read a book a day, help at the shop for a few hours a day, and produce a one-page autobiography. Thousands and thousands of these autobiographies have been collected and now form an impressive archive, capturing generations of writers, travelers, and dreamers who have left behind pieces of their stories. (Shakespeare and Company)

From the words of George Whitman, the man who created the now iconic store: “the I created this bookstore like a man would write a novel, building each room like a chapter, and I like people to open the door the way they open a book, a book that leads into a magic world in their imaginations”.

Shakespeare and Company is still a living novel in the heart of one of the worlds most beautiful cities.