shakespeare

Just across the street from the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris, France, sits the iconic English-language bookstore Shakespeare and Company. George Whitman founded the current Shakespeare and Company in 1951 after being inspired by Sylvia Beach’s original bookstore and library of the same name. Beach’s bookstore became a gathering place for expatriate writers like Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Joyce, and Eliot, to name a few. Following suit, Whitman’s Shakespeare and Company has served as a gathering place for authors such as Allen Ginsburg, William Burroughs, Henry Miller, and countless others. At Shakespeare and Company you’ll find a broad range of antiquarian, used, and new books, as well as a café, a piano room, and several typewriters that patrons are invited to use to leave letters in the store for other visitors. You may even run into the cat who lives in the store. This bookstore is a must-see for any book lover who visits to be Paris.

Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, London Bridge—each of these and a thousand other landmarks make London worth seeing. But for many visitors, the most fabulous side of London is found in the west . . . the West End, that is. This side of London boasts some of Britain’s finest hotels, restaurants, cinemas—and, of course, theatres, the hallmark of West End.