Shakespeare and Company, New Edition

by Sylvia Beach

Book Overview

Sylvia Beach was intimately acquainted with the expatriate and visiting writers of the Lost Generation, a label that she never accepted. Like moths of great promise, they were drawn to her well-lighted bookstore and warm hearth on the Left Bank. Shakespeare and Company evokes the zeitgeist of an era through its revealing glimpses of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Andre Gide, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Alice...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0803260970
• ISBN13: 9780803260979
• Release Date: October 1991
• Publisher: Bison
• Length: 268 Pages
• Weight: 0.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Shakespeare and Company

This book arrived in excellent condition and during the time it was anticipated. It is a wonderful book of memoirs by Sylvia Beach about her book store and lending library in Paris during the 20's and 30's.

Shakespeare would be proud

What a wonderful find! This book is truly a treasure and made me wish I had been an author in Paris during the 20's. Sylvia Beach ran her library Shakespeare and Company on the left bank on Rue l'Odeon for many years and served as the location for English language books in Paris. During that time she worked closely with Joyce and personally handled not only publishing Ulysses but also took care of all his mail and the shipping of his books to various customers around the world. There is a rather funny scene she describes. Because it was so hard to get Ulysses into America (since it was banned), Sylvia had a dilemma concerning distribution. Hemingway, who proclaims himself Sylvia's "best customer", tells her not to worry and within a few days he comes back to let her know he has a friend who has moved to Canada who will personally bring the books into America by ferry, stuffed in his pants. I cannot say enough what a beautiful book this is. Beach is as gifted as the authors she esteemed and brings to life a world you wish you could climb into. I would also highly recommend A Moveable Feast by Earnest Hemingway in conjunction to this.

A real treat for book lovers.

Every once in a great while I stumble upon a book I've never heard of and feel as though I've discovered treasure. This is such a book. Though I had heard of Sylvia Beach and her famous book shop/lending library, her memoir "Shakespeare & Company" was unknown to me. In an easy, conversational style, Beach gives the history of her shop and observational portraits of the various artists who treated her establishment as a salon of sorts. These artists included Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, T. S. Eliot and Andre Gide, among others. She expounds upon her experiences as James Joyce's publisher and benefactress to a considerable depth, while never overtly acknowledging the intimate nature of her relationship with Adrienne Monnier. Beach's life in Paris and her interactions with 'the lost generation,' was published almost fifty years ago, but remains engaging, enjoyable and relevant today. Indeed a treat.

The reason the "lost generation" was never truly lost.

Sylvia Beach, with eyes and ears that missed little in the way of nuance and subtlety, as much compassion for her fellows as passion for their writing and her bookshop, and a plucky all-American, "the gal can do it" spirit, wordpaints very likely one of the most accurate portraits of literary and artistic ex-patriates in Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. While they do seem a jolly crew, Beach is unflinching in her descriptions of the tiffs and teapot tempests that regularly flew. While such works as Hemingway's MOVEABLE FEAST, McAlmon's BEING GENIUSES TOGETHER, and Janet Flanner's PARIS WAS YESTERDAY are interesting and viable, each in its own way, Sylvia's little book out-sparkles them all for wit and humane truth. A priceless gem among books about books, readers and writers.

Shakespeare in L'Oeuvre

This, a book about books, is one of my favorites. In just 220 pages, bookshop owner Sylvia Beach, owner of the bookstore "Shakespeare and Company," paints a vivid portrait of the social, cultural, and especially , in Paris.The store opened in November 1919, offering works of T.S. Elliot, Joyce, Chaucer, and others, a variety of literary reviews, and photographs of Wilde and Whitman. It ran first as kind of lending library, and almost immediately the many native and expatriate writers of Europe were borrowing books--and giving her their own new writings. Very early customers included Gide, Maurois, American poet Robert McAlmon , "Mr. and Mrs. Pound, " and the following couple:"Not long after I opened my bookshop, two women came walking down the rue Dupuytren. One of them, with a very fine face, was stout, wore a long robe, and, on her head, a most becoming top of a basket. She was accompanied by a slim, dark whimsical woman: she reminded me of a gypsy. They were Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas."Sylvia Beach writes clearly, candidly, and fondly of her many visitors and friends in prewar Europe, especially the 1920's ( she and her friends dismantled the shop when the Nazis threatened to confiscate her books in 1941). She evokes an entire era though richly told and plentiful anecdotes. She writes of encounters and friendships with such notables as Sherwood Anderson, Katherine Anne Porter, Satie, Bryher, H.D., Paul Valery, Valery Larbaud, D. H. Lawrence, and Hemingway (at the end of the book, Hemingway liberates "the wine cellar at the Ritz" (Hemingway's words) as he and his company try to rid the Rue l'Odeon of the remaining German snipers. Perhaps her closest relationship was with James Joyce, and she tells many stories, both amusing and sad, about him. (Sylvia Beach published the first edition of the highly controversial "Ulysses" in 1922.) The book feels intimate; one feels as if M. Beach has let one into her confidence. Highly enjoyable, fascinating, personal--and ultimately thrilling.