Shakespeare & Company

Memoir of a Paris Bookshop in the 1920s

American ex-pat and arts scene insider, Sylvia Beach, opened her Paris bookshop and lending library, "Shakespeare & Company", in late November, 1919. It was an English language bookshop and the opening coincided with an influx of American and British artists and writers to Paris after World War I, now referred to as the "Lost Generation". The bookshop was an immediate success. As Sylvia says:

"A good many friends had been waiting for the opening of Shakespeare and Company; and the news soon got around that the time had come. Still I didn't really expect to see anybody that day. And just as well, I thought. I would need at least twenty-four hours to realize this Shakespeare and Company bookshop. But the shutters in which the little shop went to bed every night were hardly removed (by a waiter from a nearby cafe) when the first friends began to turn up. From that moment on, for over twenty years, they never gave me time to meditate...The news of my bookshop, to my surprise...spread all over the United States, and it was the first thing the pilgrims looked up in Paris...Often, they would inform me that they had given Shakespeare and Company as their address, and they hoped I didn't mind."

In the summer of 1920 Sylvia attended a party where she was introduced to James Joyce. This meeting proved to be a watershed moment for Shakespeare and Company and for James Joyce. He became a "regular" at the bookshop, often sitting next to Sylvia's desk and telling her of his life and the difficulties of being a poor writer with a family to support. At this time Joyce had been working on Ulysses "for seven years and was trying to finish it". Between 1918 and 1920, twenty-three installments had been published in The Little Review, an American literary journal. When obscenity charges were leveled against the journal, publication of the installments ceased. Joyce was left in limbo and was seeking a publisher. Sylvia Beach offered to publish Ulysses and the rest is history.

Shakespeare & Company tells the story of the publication of Ulysses, but it is also a fascinating tale of the "Lost Generation" in Paris. We are introduced to Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Archibald MacLeish, Stuart Gilbert, Djuna Barnes, Sherwood Anderson, D.H. Lawrence and his wife Frieda (later a friend of Georgia O'Keefe when they both lived in the Taos, New Mexico art colony).

Although I read this book for background on The Ulysses Project, it proved to be about so much more. It has languished on my bookshelf for years but this was definitely the right time to read it. Funny how that works!

If you are interested in the "Lost Generation" and life in 1920s Paris, I highly recommend this wonderful book.