For some twenty years, this was the destination if you wanted English books in Paris, but it was also a locus of drink and conversation, a place, on days when your writing ran dry, where you could go and be seen to be a writer. A small kitchenette stood just out of view, ready to discharge refreshments. The walls bore likenesses of Blake, Whitman, and Poe, as well as Oscar Wilde in his usual Byzantine splendor. Beneath the rows and rows of books stood a warm stove, squashy chairs, a table scattered with current magazines. Inside, the store presented the air of a domestic parlor. The front windows displayed rows of covers bearing the names Chaucer, Shakespeare, Eliot, and Joyce. The store was called Shakespeare and Company out front hung a shingle bearing a portrait of the Bard. During the nineteen-twenties, the literary capital of the United States was a bookstore on the Left Bank in Paris, on an alleyway off the Boulevard St.
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