Beach’s “Shakespeare and Company”

Sylvia Beach (1887-1962) with the help of her partner, Adrienne Monnier (1892-1955), opened Shakespeare & Company in 1919.  Beach’s English-language bookshop was originally established on rue Dupuytren, moving to 12 rue de l’Odéon in 1921, where the store remained until 1941. The wooden Directoire facade of the shop was removed after the war, and the street-level frontage rebuilt in stone. Subsequently, it housed a gift store, a jeweller and, currently, a boutique for womens’ clothes. The only indication of its history is a small stone tablet between the floors noting that Ulysses was published there. The “new” Shakespeare & Company today is located at 37 Rue Bûcherie.

In the 1920s the store was a gathering place for writers such as Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, Ford Madox Ford (English author; grandson of Ford Madox Brown), F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Man Ray, André Gide & James Joyce.

Beach initially published Joyce’s Ulysses in 1922, which was banned in the United States & in the United Kingdom. Subsequent editions were published under the Shakespeare & Company imprint in later years.

Beach was rounded up & sent to the Vittel detention camp at the end of 1942, but set free in 1943 because Monnier appealed to Jacques Benoist-Mechin, minister of police in the Vichy government. (Glass, Charles Americans in Paris: Life & Death under the Nazi Occupation  NY: Penguin, 2011).

Beach is buried in Princeton, NJ, where she lived before moving to Europe when her father became minister of the First Presbyterian Church.  Her papers are archived at Princeton University