sylvia beach shakespeare and company book

As I hesitated at the door, she got up quickly and opened it, and, drawing me into the shop, greeted me with much warmth. She peered in through the shop window, excitedly looking at the “shelves containing volumes in the glistening ‘crystal paper’ overcoats that French books wear while waiting, often for a long time, to be taken to the binders,” In her autobiography, Shakespeare and Company, Beach described their first meeting. As soon as she entered the street it reminded her of the colonial houses in Princeton, where she had grown up. She did not know the district but set out across the Seine to find it. “If angular Sylvia, in her boxlike suits, was Alice in Wonderland at forty, pink and white, buxom Adrienne in her grey-blue uniform, bodiced, with peplum and a long full skirt, was a French milkmaid from the 18th-century.”Īdrienne had her bookshop on the Rue d l’Odéon first that was where she met Sylvia, who had moved from New Jersey to Paris via Spain in 1917.īeach had found a reference in the National Library to a volume of verse by Paul Fort and was told the book could be purchased at A. It was not just writers who haunted Sylvia’s bookshop: the American composer Virgil Thomson ‘often loafed at Sylvia Beach’s shop, where I had the privilege of borrowing books free ’ Thomson contrasts the two women in his autobiography. Monnier published her own French-language literary magazine Le Navire d’Argent and published the French translation of Ulysses. Shakespeare and Company brought out James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, which had been suppressed in the United States, Ireland, and England.”īeach’s partner, Adrienne Monnier, had her own, French-language, bookshop across the street, La Société des Amis du Livre. Some of those who were connected with it from the beginning and as you might say grew up with it, were Robert McAlmon, Ernest Hemingway, Thornton Wilder, Scott Fitzgerald, Archibald McLeish, Kay Boyle – to name only a few: their elders were Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, T.S. Opened an American bookshop-lending library on the left bank, Paris in 1919 – called Shakespeare and Company: which was rather famous as a result of writers. Sylvester Woodbridge Beach who was pastor of the First Presbyterian Church in Princeton, New Jersey: This musing on her active years in literary Paris is excerpted from Everybody I Can Think Of Ever: Meetings That Made the Avant-Garde by Francis Booth, reprinted by permission.īeach wrote her own résumé towards the end of her life in a letter dated April 23, 1951, to the American Library in post-war Paris, when she donated the remaining books from Shakespeare and Company to them. Sylvia Beach (1887 – 1962) was the legendary owner of the legendary bookshop Shakespeare and Company the meeting place for all of literary Paris in the 1920s, and the publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922.

Sylvia beach shakespeare and company book