“I must go down where all the ladders start in the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.” Featuring the WB Yeats quote on its website, [Shakespeare & Company](http://www.shakespeareandcompany.com/) is a place that does more than sell books. Named after a bookstore frequented by Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and James Joyce during the 1920s, the shop on Paris’s Left Bank has become equally legendary. Opened in 1951 by the American George Whitman – and run by his daughter Sylvia since his death in 2011 – it became a gathering place for Beat Generation writers like Allen Ginsberg and William S Burroughs. From the start, Whitman allowed travelling artists and writers to lodge at the shop, which is also a lending library; the spirits of past authors haunt its crowded walls. (Photo: [John R Rogers](www.JohnRRogers.com))