Shakespeare and Company is a small but legendary independent bookstore in Paris set up by George Whitman as "a socialist utopia masquerading as a bookstore". The bookshop is famous for allowing inspiring writers and artists to stay for free in exchange for helping out around the bookstore and contributing an autobiography to the shop's archives. Famous visitors include Ernest Hemingway, Jack Kerouac, James Joyce and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The unique community the shop has fostered has allowed it to amass a treasure trove of stories, photographs, handwritten notes and newspaper clippings which have been distilled into this scrapbook-like memoir which includes contributions from Allen Ginsberg, Anaïs Nin, Ethan Hawke, Robert Stone and Jeanette Winterson.