And on a morning when any number of people may be reading a book at their tablet on the streets below, its nice to know not everything is changing. It is, as it ever was, a place where enthusiastic people can read, write, learn, teach, work, and live. It has changed locations, transferred owners, evolved its clientele, and weathered shifts in the publishing industry, but in the second story reading room with the windows open over the Seine, these changes seem distant and minute. While Shakespeare & Company is a tourist attraction - as it has been for a very long time - what it has been for even longer, although not by much, is a functioning bookshop providing English-language reading material and interaction for the people of Paris.

Shakespeare & Company is one of the few places to remain open in the face of the traditional French observation of the Sabbath. In the reading rooms above the shop, where the books are not for sale, more steady clientele spend their Sundays. Many people come to the rue de la Bûcherie to buy a stamped copy of Ulysses or The Sun Also Rises and take a picture in front of the famous storefront of Shakespeare & Company, the famed Paris English-language bookshop. Musty books are stacked two rows deep on wall after wall of crooked shelves in rooms full of old chairs with loose joints and thin cushions, rooms filled with the familiar reverberation of more English than you are used to hearing. The windows are dusty in the corners of the grilles, the glass has rippled at the bottoms of the panes, and on this spring morning the leaves of a sprawling tree uncurl just outside.

Sylvia beach hemingway