Shakespeare and Company

The most famous bookshop in the world owes its name to a lesbian love story. Sylvia Beach opened the original Shakespeare and Company in 1919; across the street, her life partner Adrienne Monnier ran La Maison des Amis des Livres. Between their two shops on rue de l'Odéon ran the current of modernist literature — and when no publisher would touch Joyce's Ulysses, Beach published it herself in 1922. The couple anchored the Left Bank's queer expatriate world until the war closed the shop in 1941. In 1951 George Whitman opened his own anarchic English bookshop by Notre-Dame and, in 1964, renamed it Shakespeare and Company in Beach's honour. It became a haven in its own right — James Baldwin, Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs passed through — and Whitman named his daughter Sylvia; she runs the shop today, still lodging young writers ('Tumbleweeds') among the shelves. Visiting: open daily roughly 10am-8pm, with the café alongside. Go for the books, stay for the lineage — and glance at 12 rue de l'Odéon (a plaque marks Beach's original) to complete the story.