Sylvia Beach — Shakespeare & Company, Paris

“…a good-sized, pleasant, uncommercial-looking bookstore.”

Sylvia. Image: hansen-munk.de

In the afternoon we went to Shakespeare and Co., Sylvia Beach’s famous bookshop on the rue de I’Odéon. Shakespeare and Co., which had published Joyce’s Ulysses, was simply a good-sized, pleasant, uncommercial-looking bookstore. There was one rather large book-lined room, with another smaller one adjoining. At the desk sat a woman whom I knew, from pictures I had seen, to be Miss Beach. She was a fair handsome woman in a severe suit, in her forties, I would have said; an Englishwoman; and in her manner there was something a bit severe and mannish. Yet she was an American…Morley Callaghan

Sylvia Beach was born Nancy Woodbridge Beach, on the 14th March 1887, in the smart New Jersey town of Bridgeton. Her father was a Presbyterian pastor who took his family on a visit to Paris in 1901, where Sylvia fell in love with the city at once.

With the outbreak of the First World War, in 1914, Sylvia moved back to Europe and became a Red Cross nurse in Serbia, where she met her partner and lover, Adrienne Monnier. After two years with the Red Cross, Sylvia and Adrienne moved to Paris in 1916 and founded Shakespeare & Company in the aforementioned rue de I’ Odéon.

Hemingway with Beach outside Shakespeare & Co. Image: leftinparis

The shop immediately became a focus for ex-pat American, British and Irish authors. In 1922, as Morley Callaghan informed us earlier, Sylvia published James Joyce’s Ulysses (Ernest Hemingway actually helped Joyce with the final drafts) to both acclaim and ridicule.

Hemingway made his first visit to Shakespeare & Company soon after arriving in Paris, but decided not to show Sylvia his letter of introduction from novelist Sherwood Anderson, but instead asked her what books he should read. Sylvia suggested he start with Turgenev, and then move on to D.H. Lawrence, which he did. He actually bought books too, which was a rarity in such a philanthropic organization as Shakespeare & Company.

Ernest Hemingway and Hadley loved her bookshop, mainly because it was warm, and you could linger there unmolested for hours, and as Hemingway’s biographer, Carlos Baker…