sylvia beach shakespeare and company book

Eliot, Thornton Wilder, Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, and F.Scott Fitzgerald. Her frequent visitors included: Janet Flanner, Gertrude Stein, Natalie Barney, Andre Gide, Ezra Pound, D.H. Shakespeare & Company was a literary center, lending library, and publishing company that flourished between the two World Wars. The store was the first English language bookshop on Paris’ Left Bank. She owned and ran a bookstore, Shakespeare & Company in Paris. Beach stayed, never returning to the USA, living the rest of her life abroad.īeach is one more of the best known figures of the many Paris American expatriates in the first part of the 20th century. During World War I, she and her sister volunteered for the Red Cross in Europe. Her father was associate pastor of the American Church in Paris and young Sylvia dreamed that she would someday live in the City of Lights forever. You might know that Portland, Oregon is the home of what I believe is the very best bookstore on our pretty spinning blue orb: Powell’s City Of Books, a spot visited by both tourists and locals with equal passion, and open during the plague although it has canceled all events.īorn on this day, to a Presbyterian pastor and his wife in a small town in Princeton, New Jersey, Nancy Woodridge Beach changed her name to Sylvia when she was a teenager. I cannot fathom the idea of reading a magazine or book without feeling the pages and the weight in my hands. I am certain many of my friends on social media have reading devices, but I do not own one. It is hard to grasp that books might be on the way to becoming a thing of the past. I have always loved to spend time and money in a bookstore. Reading has been a major force in my life, even before I could read. I suppose I actually am a bit bookish, with my hundreds of books stacked around the house.

I had always held that “bookish” meant a cardigan wearing, dotty eccentric person living in a small space with their books and seven cats named: Twain, Dickens, Proust, Tolstoy, Poe, Fitzgerald, and Rum Tum Tigger. I recently overheard someone I barely know refer to me, along with old and bald, as “bookish”. No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.“ She was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip. Sylvia had a lively, sharply sculptured face, brown eyes that were alive as a small animal’s and gay as a young girl’s, and wavy brown hair that was brushed back from her fine forehead. I borrowed books from the library of Shakespeare & Company, which was the bookstore of Sylvia Beach at 12 Rue de l’Odéon. “In those days there was no money to buy books.

1920, photographer unknown, public domain

Sylvia beach shakespeare and company book