Sylvia Beach’s shop in Paris offered bed and board, and books. With $3,000 and a passion for books, she made literary history. The Telegraph has more.
From the story...
Sylvia Beach’s Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company had barely been open two years when she decided to publish Ulysses.
“Nine stenographers gave up the typing ... and a gentleman from the British Embassy burned a dozen pages in a rage,” she wrote in a letter in 1921. “Ulysses is a masterpiece and one day will rank among the classics of English literature . . . Joyce is in Paris and I told him I would publish his book after the publishers in New York threw up the job in a fright.”
Beach was in her early thirties, and had settled in Paris in the days when a small amount of money and a lot of hard work went a long way. Her French lover, Adrienne Monnier, ran a French-language bookshop, La Maison des Amis des Livres, but Sylvia wanted an English-language shop, and soon the two of them had premises opposite each other in the Rue de l’Odéon.
Everybody came: Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, André Gide, William Carlos Williams. They didn’t come sometimes, they came often, using the shop as a meeting place, a reading room, an accommodation agency, a think tank and a bank.
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