Sylvia Beach — Shakespeare & Company, Paris
“…a good-sized, pleasant, uncommercial-looking bookstore.”
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.
