With his own collection of one thousand books, and having come into a small inheritance, Whitman bought an Arab grocery and transformed it into his Paris bookstore in 1951 at 37 rue de la Bûcherie on the Left Bank. It was first called Le Mistral, but was later renamed (in 1964) Shakespeare and Company, after Sylvia Beach's earlier Paris bookstore (1919 to 1941). Beach, who visited Whitman's bookstore, is said to have called his shop the "spiritual successor" to her own.