No, that is not at all fair. This wasn't a cold business decision. George Whitman, who founded the current Paris bookstore, and Sylvia Beach, who founded the

No, that is not at all fair. This wasn't a cold business decision. George Whitman, who founded the current Paris bookstore, and Sylvia Beach, who founded the original, were very close friends. She even toyed with reopening her original shop with him, again under the name Shakespeare and Company. Two years after she died, he renamed his bookstore (Le Mistral) to Shakespeare and Company in her memory in 1964, as he thought that's what she would have liked. He also named his only daughter after her. As it happens, the second Shakespeare and Company also became a hub for authors like Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, James Baldwin, and many of the Beats. It's the sister shop of City Lights in San Francisco, with a similar author history. Whitman was awarded the Officier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. His daughter now runs the store. So in Paris there were two Shakespeare and Company bookstores, both extremely famous at different critical times in literary history, whose respective owners were very close, and which were both basically set up the same way. I think it's reasonable to say that they're both the "real" Shakespeare and Company. That's a far cry from the NYC situation.