Inturned

Extract

Sylvia Beach (1887–1962) is remembered primarily for the two feats of which she was proudest, publishing Ulysses and “STEERing a little bookshop for about twenty-two years between the two wars,” as she puts it in the text reprinted here. Her “little bookshop,” Shakespeare and Company, was for Ernest Hemingway “a warm, cheerful place with a big stove in winter, tables and shelves of books, new books in the window, and photographs on the wall of famous writers both dead and living” (35). In 1919, with support from Adrienne Monnier, the owner of a neighboring bookstore, Beach launched the Left Bank shop that would serve as a hub for French and expatriate writers.¹ In her 1959 memoir, Shakespeare and Company, Beach tells stories of her friends and patrons, who included F. Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Thornton Wilder, Gertrude Stein, Walter Benjamin, Paul Valéry, Simone de Beauvoir, HD (Hilda Doolittle), Samuel Beckett, and many others. Beach also describes there her other great feat, the publication of Ulysses. When British and American printers were prevented from publishing Joyce's Dublin epic because it was considered too obscene, Beach stepped in. Her fortuitous situation as a seller of English-language books in Paris inspired her to risk bringing out Ulysses herself. In February 1922, after a legendary struggle, the first edition of Ulysses appeared under the imprint “Shakespeare and Company.”