Huddled in a corner across the river from Notre-Dame Cathedrale is Shakespeare and Company, an Anglophone bookstore and meeting place for all who are interested. Flyers of poetry readings and events are posted on the glass windows and two men sit below the awning and smoke cigarettes as they watch the crowds of people line up for entrance into the bookshop. I left the drizzly, chilly day outside and stepped into a narrow room that was flooded with yellow light and stacks of books. The twists and turns of the store acted a bit like maze, where one could quietly slip away from friends and into the corners of the book stacks to be alone with their findings. Books in English lined the walls from floor to ceiling, offering up their availability and comfort to someone like me who was far from home. The shop was originally opened in 1951 and founded by an American named George Whitman. It was named after the original Shakespeare and Company that was founded in 1919 by Sylvia Beach, also an American. In the dates active, from 1919 to 1941, the shop saw many expat literary figures such as Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemmingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, T.S Eliot, and more - along with many celebrated French figures as well. It was a space that served as a 'home away from home' for many of these characters. A Nazi officer closed Beach’s original shop on Rue de l’Odéon when she declined to sell him a book. It is in her memory and in their collective memory that Whitman renamed his shop front ‘Shakespeare and Company' and to open up the space to literary expats in Paris at that time. Today, the store is very much still an active and celebrated space, with open poetry readings, visiting authors, and a space for everyone to feel at home in.