The owner of the first bookstore in Rue de l'Odeon — Sylvia Beach — was a close friend of the Fitzgeralds, Hemingways and many writers of the 1920s. She was the one to have arranged a lunch to introduce Fitzgerald to James Joyce whom he worshiped. In her memoirs she wrote: «Poor Scott was earning so much from his books that he and Zelda had to drink a great deal of champagne in Montmartre in an effort to get rid of it.” The store was shut down in 1940 to reopen right across Notre Dams and in 1951 it got a new owner – American George Whitman. His daughter Sylvia runs it now and sells books in English, with Fitzgerald’s novels of course.
