Shakespeare and Company are the names of two independent bookstores in Paris. Sylvia Beach opened the store on November 19, 1919, on Dupuytren Street, and then, in 1922, moved to a more spacious building on Odeon Street. Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, and Ford Madox Ford were met in it. The store was the center of Anglo-American culture and modernism in Paris. Ernest Hemingway, Francis Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, spent a lot of time there. Hemingway mentions the store and its visitors in the novel “A Holiday That Is Always With You.” Since Sylvia Beach refused to sell Joyce’s latest “Finnegans Wake” book to a German officer, the Shakespeare and Company store closed on June 14, 1940. At the end of the war, Hemingway “personally freed” the store from the german occupants, but the store has never reopened. After the death of Sylvia in 1964, Whitman, who was the owner of a bookstore near San Michel Square, renamed his store to Shakespeare and Company in honor of the historic store. The store has 13 beds; according to Whitman, 40,000 people have stayed there overnight since its opening. George Whitman died on December 14, 2011, at the age of 98. Whitman’s daughter Sylvia Beach Whitman manages the store today. On Sundays, the store regularly hosts tea parties, where poetry readings and meetings with authors happens. Shakespeare and Company stores in New York have no affiliation to the famous Paris namesake.