Shakespeare and Company, arguably the most famous independent bookstore in the world, occupies a prime piece of real estate facing the Seine in Paris, not far from the Latin Quarter, Place Saint-Michel, and Boulevard Saint-Germain. The river is just a stone’s throw from the front door, and a strong ultimate-Frisbee player could probably nail the south side of Notre Dame—halfway across the Seine on Île de la Cité—from one of the shop’s second-floor windows. The view is that good.

Strolling up to the store’s early 17th-century building on a one-block stretch of Rue de la Bûcherie, with its small half-plaza in front, its weather-beaten bookstalls, its green-and-yellow façade, its hand-hewn, rustic-looking signage, can feel like entering a time warp to a quieter, older Paris—a little bit Beat Generation, a little bit Victor Hugo. That is, until you notice a queue waiting to get into the store, as there often is on weekends and during the busy summer months, or a group of tourists stopping on the sidewalk to snap photos. There might also be an outdoor reading taking place, as there was on an early evening last spring, when a California poet could be heard reciting sexually explicit work from her collection Pussy. Tourists, customers, dirty poems, a crowd of 40 or 50 mostly attentive listeners; Colette, the shop dog, a friendly black mutt who wandered into and out of the crowd; a homeless man who stopped to listen with one eye on a table stocked with glasses of wine intended for a post-reading fête; slanting sunlight—all coexisted in splendid fashion, the tableau like a bookish, modern-day Brueghel. Or you might have preferred the evening in July when Zadie Smith was reading inside the store while a hardy, overflow crowd listened from the sidewalk despite a steady rain, the patterns of dozens of opened umbrellas evoking a Pierre Bonnard canvas while Smith’s voice, on speakers, mimicked the inflections of 21st-century London. There are reasons this English-language bookshop is a destination, far from Amazon.

Unfortunately, as former patrons of the demolished Rizzoli bookstore on West 57th Street, in Manhattan, know, these are perilous times for independent bookstores squatting on valuable acreage. (Happily, Rizzoli will reopen next year in a new location off Madison Square Park.) In recent years, Shakespeare and Company, which owns its space, has had to fend off waves of potential buyers—sometimes very pushy ones. Boutique hoteliers have eyed the building hungrily, and not long ago, the owner of a kebab chain popped in to the store’s rare-book annex, circled an imperious finger in the air to indicate the entire operation, and asked, point-blank, “How much?” Happily, the answer has remained a firm Non.

The real threat to this bookshop has been dynastic. It is a question that has plagued many creative enterprises, from movie studios to museums to TV series: how do you preserve and extend the work of a founding visionary when that visionary is no longer on hand? Walt Disney and Steve Jobs might have liked to know. In the case of Shakespeare’s, as the store is known informally, the short answer is you get lucky. A slightly longer answer is you have a remarkable daughter.

It is not true, as the store’s workers have sometimes overheard passing tour guides proclaim, that James Joyce lies buried in the cellar. (If only. He was laid to rest at a conventional, non-bookselling cemetery in Zurich.) But the store’s roots do indeed reach back to the Shakespeare and Company that Sylvia Beach, an American expatriate, owned in Paris in the 1920s and 30s. As every English major knows, her bookshop and lending library became a hangout for Lost Generation writers such as Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound, and Joyce, whose Ulysses was first published in its complete form by Beach because authorities in Britain and America deemed it obscene. She closed up shop during the Nazi occupation and never reopened. But her mantle was taken up by another American, George Whitman, who opened the present-day store in 1951, just as Beat Generation writers were finding their way to the Left Bank. (The so-called Beat Hotel, which would become a Parisian equivalent to New York’s Chelsea Hotel as a flophouse for writers, artists, and musicians, was only a few blocks away.) Writers who logged time at the current Shakespeare and Company, sometimes even sleeping there—Whitman was possibly keener on extending hospitality to authors, lauded or not, than on selling their books—include Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, Lawrence Durrell, Anaïs Nin, James Jones, William Styron, Ray Bradbury, Julio Cortázar, James Baldwin, and Gregory Corso. Another early visitor, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, co-founded his City Lights Bookstore, in San Francisco, as a sister institution two years after Shakespeare’s opened. William S. Burroughs pored over Whitman’s collection of medical textbooks to research portions of Naked Lunch; he also gave what may have been the first public reading from his novel-in-progress at the store. (“Nobody was quite sure what to make of it, whether to laugh or be sick,” Whitman later said.) Aside from Zadie Smith, more recent generations have been represented at the store by Martin Amis, Dave Eggers, Carol Ann Duffy, Paul Auster, Philip Pullman, Jonathan Safran Foer, Jennifer Egan, Jonathan Lethem, Lydia Davis, Charles Simic, A. M. Homes, Darin Strauss, Helen Schulman (my wife, I should note), and the list goes on. Nathan Englander, the American novelist, was married here in 2012. (A happy first for the store!)