Shakespeare and Company

This tiny English-language bookshop across from Notre-Dame is arguably the most famous independent bookstore on the planet. But the one you're standing in isn't actually the original — it's a successor, opened in 1951 by George Whitman, an eccentric American who named it after Sylvia Beach's legendary shop on Rue de l'Odéon.

Beach's original Shakespeare and Company, opened in 1919, was the epicenter of the Lost Generation. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Pound, Joyce — they all practically lived there. Beach did something no other publisher would: she published James Joyce's Ulysses in 1922, after it had been banned in the US and UK for obscenity. She hand-set some of the type herself. The Nazis shuttered the shop in 1941, reportedly after Beach refused to sell a German officer her last copy of Finnegans Wake.

Whitman's reincarnation carried on the tradition. He let aspiring writers sleep among the bookshelves for free — he called them "Tumbleweeds" — asking only that they read a book a day, work a two-hour shift in the shop, and write a single-page autobiography. Over 30,000 people have slept here over the decades. The beds are still tucked between the shelves upstairs, and the shop still takes in writers.

George died in 2011 at age 98, and his daughter Sylvia (named after Beach) now runs the place. She's added a café next door and kept the spirit alive. Above the doorway, painted in George's handwriting, is his motto: "Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise."