The sign on the front of Shakespeare and Company in Paris would have you believe many things: that there are other branches of the bookshop in Rome, Moscow, Bogotá, New York and Vienna; that it is the same Shakespeare and Company that published James Joyce’s Ulysses and provided Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, George Bernard Shaw, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein with a meeting place in Paris; and that its owner, George Whitman, is the son of the poet Walt Whitman.

The fact that none of this is true should not detract from Shakespeare and Company’s considerable charm. For years the shop has been a literary haven, offering shelter to over 40,000 people from all over the world – artists, writers, refugees, even me. Six years ago, I worked there, while at university in Paris. I spent a happy few months as part of this little community, most of whom seemed to be fleeing from something – whether it were oppressive regimes, jobs, ex-lovers, or just plain reality. A little while after I had left, Jeremy Mercer chanced upon this place and, in this entertaining memoir, he recounts the circumstances that led him there, his subsequent experiences and, most interestingly, the shop’s illustrious past.

In 1919 Sylvia Beach opened an English bookshop on the left bank of the Seine. It swiftly became the gathering point in Paris for a generation of British and American writers, and the rest is history. In 1921, it was Beach who raised the money to publish Ulysses, after it had been rejected by other publishers. Later, Hemingway immortalised the store in A Moveable Feast. But Shakespeare and Company closed in 1941, allegedly after Beach had refused to sell a Nazi officer the last copy of Finnegans Wake, before being momentarily liberated in 1944 by Hemingway. Beach, however, had retired, and the doors stayed shut.

Seven years later, George Whitman opened his own tiny English bookshop, Le Mistral, a few streets away. He later adopted the Shakespeare and Company name and moved the shop to its current location on the left bank, just opposite Notre Dame. During this time, George played host to countless writers, including Samuel Beckett (apparently they would just stare at each other), Lawrence Durrell, William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin, with whom he was rumoured to have had an affair (George eventually married, at sixty-eight, a girl forty years younger than him).

These days Shakespeare and Company is one of the main stops on the Parisian tourist trail, and it featured in the film Before Sunset. Hordes of visitors are drawn there, looking to buy a copy of A Moveable Feast (which George, out of perversity or a dislike of Hemingway, often refuses to stock), and have it stamped with the store’s official stamp – one customer was so taken by this that he asked me to stamp his passport.

This idea of Shakespeare and Company as an independent kingdom is fostered by George. After fifty years in Paris, he still speaks execrable French and is in permanent conflict with the local authorities, property developers, and his neighbours. He is intensely political and has a vision of a socialist utopia, where people take what they need and give what they can. Taking is easy enough. There is a well in the centre of the shop filled with coins donated by generous tourists. Usually some unfortunate lies on their belly in front of it, sifting through for coins of value. Those with more enterprise light fires at the back of the shop, before making off with the contents of the till in the ensuing chaos. Or they simply steal the books, returning the next day to sell them back.

As well as the tourists and thieves, there are those who stay at the shop, and Mercer portrays them well. The rules are simple – each day they must read a book and spend an hour helping in the bookshop. One guest had long since given up on this and spent his days in bed reading detective novels, to George’s mounting outrage – it was his taste in literature rather than his sloth that most horrified him. Mercer was given the task of ousting this elusive poet from the antiquarian book room which he had colonised.

Among the residents there has always been a certain rivalry for George’s favour. And few last long under this benevolent tyrant. His capriciousness and the general grime and chaos tend to drive people away in the end. It is partly this feeling of transience that gives the bookshop its magic – people come and go, before their wonder and sense of discovery evaporate entirely, and perhaps that is the way it should be.

There is a happy ending, however. At a time when George was ill and despaired of finding a successor, Jeremy Mercer arranged a reconciliation between him and his estranged daughter, Sylvia. George is now ninety-one and still active, but there is a Sylvia at the helm again. Thankfully Shakespeare and Company lives on, almost believing its own myths.