Shakespeare and Company sits on the Rue de la Bûcherie, facing Notre-Dame, though the bookshop you see today is not the one that made literary history.

The original, opened by Sylvia Beach in 1919 on Rue de l'Odéon, published James Joyce's "Ulysses" when no one else would and became a second home to Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein. Beach closed its doors in December 1941 after refusing to sell a Nazi officer her signed first edition of "Finnegan's Wake," then spirited her entire collection to a hidden apartment in just two hours.

The current shop began as Le Mistral in 1951. George Whitman renamed it in Beach's honour in 1964, and his daughter Sylvia now runs it. Film lovers may recognise the green facade from "Before Sunset," where Jesse and Celine reunite after nine years.

VoiceMap's audio tours trace both bookshops, connecting the original's wartime defiance on Rue de l'Odéon to the Beat Generation writers who gathered at the riverside successor.