SOURCE: Fitch, Noel Riley. “Sylvia Beach: Commerce, Sanctification, and Art on the Left Bank.” In A Living of Words: American Women in Print Culture, edited by Susan Albertine, pp. 189-206. Knoxville, Tenn.: The University of Tennessee Press, 1995.

[In the following essay, Fitch outlines the importance of Beach's bookshop, detailing its business operations and reflecting on its significance as a meeting place for American writers in Paris during those years.]

Sylvia Beach fled the Presbyterian parsonage of Princeton, New Jersey, to create a life for herself abroad. After working in journalism, volunteer farming during World War I, and the Red Cross in Serbia, Beach founded a bookselling and lending business called Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank of Paris. Through this business she was able to support herself both vocationally and avocationally, for she was an avid reader. By applying the missionary zeal of her ancestors to a life of service beyond personal aggrandizement and financial profit, she gained a kind of secular sainthood.

The literary and spiritual achievements of Sylvia Beach (1887-1962) and her Shakespeare and Company bookshop (1919-41) have been documented in a biography (Fitch's Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, 1983), in histories (Benstock's Women of the Left Bank, 1986; Ford's Published in Paris, 1975), and in the numerous memoirs and autobiographies of this century. More attention has been paid to her work as publisher of James Joyce than to the means of her sanctification, her career as bookseller—or to choose a better word—bookkeeper, the only English word with three consecutive double letters. What follows is a more detailed look at the specifics of her business and how it corresponded to her view of gender roles.

Though Sylvia Beach created what may be the most famous bookshop in history, she was not the only American woman of business devoted to the arts in Paris. There were a number of “bookkeepers” who wrote, printed, published, sold, distributed, reviewed, and publicized books. Among these were four other publishers: Nancy Cunard, an Englishwoman who hand-set books for her Hours Press; Barbara Harrison, who elegantly printed books for her Harrison of Paris; Caresse Crosby, who with her husband, Harry, published books for their Black Sun Press; and Alice B. Toklas, who with Gertrude Stein sold a Picasso and founded Plain Editions to publish five of Stein's books. Among the founders of little magazines were Florence Gilliam (Gargoyle), Ethel Moorhead (This Quarter), Margaret Anderson and Jane Heap (Little Review), and Harriet Weaver (Egoist). Adrienne Monnier, Beach's life-partner, was the French writer, publisher, and owner of La Maison des Amis des Livres bookshop. Janet Flanner reviewed books in the New Yorker, and Natalie Barney and Gertrude Stein had weekly salons that brought writers, translators, and editors together. Thus, perhaps at no other time in history have women so actively participated in the business of art and the art of business. Morrill Cody said, “it was the women among us who shaped and directed and nourished the social and artistic and literary life of the Anglo-American colony” (Cody and Ford 11). Benstock calls it “literary midwifery” in the birth of modernism (20).

Among all these accomplished American women, Beach was the most successful businesswoman and entrepreneur, for she founded and operated for twenty-two years the first English-language bookshop and lending library on the Left Bank. She had no formal training for this career. As a bookworm who dieted chiefly on French parchment, her only stock in trade was a love of books and writers. Whatever she learned about operating a business came from Adrienne Monnier, who had founded her House of the Friends of Books in 1916. It was Monnier who found the location for the first shop for Beach on rue Dupuytren and, when two years later a shop opened across the street from her own shop on rue de l'Odéon, who helped Beach move around the corner. There they could face each other across this little street and create what Monnier called “Odéonia,” that spiritual place for book lovers. Monnier helped her learn to deal with the landlord, carpenter, plumber, tax man, and government bureaucrats. She also helped to arrange for the publication of Joyce's Ulysses with her own printer in Dijon, Maurice Darantière. Beach and Monnier were lovers, friends, and business associates. In a sense they divided the literary trade, Monnier handling the French-language books, Beach the English.

The true business of Shakespeare and Company was threefold: lending books, selling books, and publishing books. All the literary readings, private teas with authors, apartment referrals, check cashing, translating, and editing were in addition to these. Book lending (virtually unknown in Paris bookstores then) was the chief activity of the shop, because paperback publication for English-language books had not yet come into existence. Thus books were too expensive, especially for struggling writers. Ernest Hemingway, Archibald MacLeish, Katherine Anne Porter, and all the other members of Shakespeare and Company borrowed and returned books.

Beach was a casual librarian who had no cards in the books. When a member—she called them “bunnies” after the French word for subscriber, abonne—paid from five to twelve francs per month (depending on the number of books), she wrote the name at the top of a card and beneath that, the titles of the books borrowed. To the left was the date of borrowing; to the right the date of return. She gave free subscriptions to Henry Miller, Virgil Thomson, Porter, and others who did not have money at the time. These cards, which remain in the Sylvia Beach Papers at Princeton University Library, are a valuable resource for today's scholars, for they reveal the reading habits of the leading writers between the wars. For example, a look at the cards reveals that Stein read all of William Dean Howells; Hemingway read Turgenev over and over; and in the 1930s Simone de Beauvoir read Hemingway and Faulkner. Beach's process for lending books was simple and designed for the ease of the reader, but its simplicity made it difficult for the librarian if she had to remember who had borrowed what book. Then she had to search each card for the title. Monnier called this “le plan américain”—not because it had a prescribed plan, but precisely because it did not: no call numbers, no catalog, no index cards.

The fact that subscribers to the lending library could purchase flexible membership from one to twelve months made it convenient for artists who were short of change or just planning a short stay in Paris. But Beach had a steady clientele of foreign residents in Paris. Only once did she record the average length of subscription, on the back of an address book for the mid-1930s. During this period the lending library had a monthly average of thirty-four one-month members and fourteen twelve-month members. There were always at least eight or ten people who held free memberships. The average of eighty-nine paying members a month (about a third of them new members) during the spring of 1936 was undoubtedly a record number, because during the next months membership fluctuated from a low of fifty-four in July to a high of eighty-six in October of 1936, and from a high of eighty-seven in February to a low of sixty-eight in July of 1937. These records of the 1936-37 year, the only records preserved of the number of library subscribers, were probably kept during the drive by the Friends of Shakespeare and Company to save the shop from financial crisis in the mid-1930s. The Friends was founded by André Gide, who took out his first membership, for a year, on December 1, 1919, and borrowed a book entitled Minor Elizabethan Drama.

To facilitate the return of overdue library books, Beach ordered printed postcards from Darantière, on the back of which was sketched William Shakespeare seated behind an open book, tearing out his hair by the roots. Below the drawing was printed “please return,” with space for the book title. At the bottom was printed the bookshop name and address. A careful look at the record books at Princeton University reveals that only a few, including Joyce and Hemingway, forgot to return their books.

The bookselling side of the business was just as casual as the lending library, but it had more potential to add money to the cash drawer. Sales fluctuated seasonally and annually. Predictably, more books and journals sold during the tourist months every year. There were days in the late 1930s when few if any books sold. No books sold during the opening days of World War II, when the Germans occupied Paris. The “sales department” of the shop, said Beach in an early draft of her memoirs, “was practically non-existent” during the depth of the Depression (Sylvia Beach Papers, Box 166). During the 1920s sales fluctuated between five and twenty books and journals a day, including Ulysses. In 1923, for example, she averaged (beyond Joyce's novel) eight sales of books and journals a day in January, eleven a day in June. Although no one has studied all the specific titles that she sold, a brief look at her sales books reveals that she sold chiefly modern works, the nineteenth-century classics, and Shakespeare, her patron saint.

Because she sold to French students, professors, and authors, she made a considerable contribution to introducing American literature to the French.¹ The sales of more costly American book titles for one year, 1926, reflect her interests. It was the year that Beach held a special exhibit of Walt Whitman manuscripts and books, which were more popular with the French writers than with the visiting American writers; the year that American composers were featured in a special concert given by their teacher Nadia Boulanger; and the year that George Antheil unveiled to raucous audiences his Ballet mécanique. American words and music were everywhere in 1926.

At least a fifth of these books, including those by Bird, cummings, and Pound, were published by little presses operating in Paris. The range and author representation of this American list (which does not include journals) does not differ considerably from the books that she sold during the first and last months of operation. In fact, Pound's Cathay was the first book she ever sold, followed soon by Whitman's poetry.

A closer look at the American authors that sold the most during the year 1926 shows that the titles of T. S. Eliot, who lived in London but came to Paris for events such as the Whitman exhibit and the Antheil concert, sold more (twenty-two) than any other author. After Eliot there followed, among the American authors: Hemingway with thirteen, Pound with twelve, Whitman and Sherwood Anderson with ten each, cummings with eight, and James with seven. All except James and Whitman (both dead) were regular members of the company. This fact illustrates one reason the avant-garde writers were in Paris: their readership was here. Prominent on the Left Bank was Hemingway, whose The Sun Also Rises and In Our Time had just been published by commercial publishing companies; all the temptations of success—or so he would remember it—were breaking up his marriage to Hadley, his wife of five years. The Whitman sales reflect the combined impact of both Beach's exhibition (April 21 through June 30) and the March issue of Monnier's journal Le Navire d'Argent, an all-American issue with translations of short works by McAlmon, Hemingway, Williams, cummings, and others, and an essay by Whitman translated by Beach and Monnier. The sales of cummings's books may reflect the fact that he received the Dial poetry prize for 1926. Several titles in addition to the Hemingway books were newly published works, including those by Van Vechten, Wescott, H. D., Pound, and Loos. (James Joyce bought one of the Loos books and read it in three days during November, according to Beach.) Loos aside, the avant-garde bought and sold their works at the shop, where their lives and works were intertwined.

Ten years later (1936), according to her ledgers at Princeton, Eliot's titles were still selling more (twenty-three) than any other except Joyce. Nine Hemingway titles sold, along with the other authors on the 1926 list. But by this time there were more titles of the premodern classics, probably a reflection of the disappearance of the little publishing companies in Paris. The last full year of operation for Shakespeare and Company was 1941, when the biggest sellers, with fourteen each, were Hemingway (nine copies of Farewell to Arms) and Pearl Buck's The Good Earth. Joyce, Eliot, and Whitman were still selling, but readers during this war year preferred realistic fiction.

A close analysis of her book sales reveals the fluctuating interest in British and American literature in Paris between the wars. Her preference for Whitman, Eliot, Hemingway, and, of course, Joyce is reflected in the steady sale of their titles over a twenty-year period. Among these, only Whitman, because he lived in the previous century, was not her friend. Other titles sold perennially, including Mother Goose and Little Women, the Oxford dictionary, Cassell's French-English dictionary, and Frazer's The Golden Bough. There were obvious trends; for example, several books on Spain were sold in 1926 following the appearance of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

English literature accounted for the bulk of book sales in the earliest months of the bookshop. Joseph Conrad and Shakespeare were the most popular, followed by Rudyard Kipling and Samuel Butler. During the mid-1920s, sales increased for poetry by Blake, Yeats, and Keats and for novels by Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf. During 1926 there were sold, among the English titles, works by Bernard Shaw, W. H. Hudson, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield (three copies of The Garden Party), and Norman Douglas (four copies of South Wind). The big seller for 1929 and the few years that followed was D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, which Beach had declined to republish despite the urging of Lawrence. His books sold steadily through the 1930s. The all-time best-selling author was, of course, James Joyce. Often the same customer bought several books by Joyce—Exiles, Chamber Music, Dubliners, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, and Ulysses—whose sales were listed separately at the bottom of the ledger each day. Often beside the record of a sale of the novel, Beach would write “1 Frenchman,” “3 tourists,” or “1 red-headed American.” On September 10, 1924, she recorded “repaired copy to Eleanor Wilson,” her Princeton friend and the daughter of the former U.S. President. By the middle of the 1920s, she was also selling Joyce criticism, such as Herbert Gorman's James Joyce and Stuart Gilbert's James Joyce's Ulysses, a key to the novel.

The little artistic magazines from which modern literature was launched made up an important element of her sales. With rare exceptions (for example, Fitzgerald), authors of the early twentieth century first published in little magazines—magazines that were either censored or ignored by the U.S. market. The bookshop was their major distribution point. Some of these little magazines were published in America (Little Review and Poetry) and England (Egoist), but most came from Left Bank expatriates: Gargoyle, transatlantic review, This Quarter, transition. Poor patrons could borrow a copy of one of these magazines.

The expense for commercially published books was enormous, for all the English-language books had to be imported. The exceptions were the little expatriate press books printed in France: Robert McAlmon's Contact Editions, William Bird's Three Mountains Press, Edward Titus's Black Manikin, the Crosbys' Black Sun Press, Stein and Toklas's Plain Editions, Cunard's Hours Press, Harrison of Paris, and Beach's own editions of Joyce's works. For all these small presses, she was the major distributor because many of the titles were censored in Britain and America or were not imported because their chief audience was the avant-garde in Paris. But the books from large English and American presses were expensive, and import duty high. Beach had to juggle bookkeeping in three currencies, a task that probably frustrated her more than any other, for she had no aptitude for mathematics. On more than one occasion a friend tried to teach her the fine points of bookkeeping, to no avail.

The business of selling books was complicated by the international system of selling, mailing, importing, and taxing books; it was simplified by Beach's casual approach. She was anything but casual in choosing and reading the books, of course, but once they arrived, she did not put prices in them. She encouraged people to look through, even read them in the shop, and often gave informal lectures on the author and work for her English-speaking French patrons. Through the years the sales of her books, as revealed in her records, reflect her interests and enthusiasms. She had “all the theories that many booksellers would like to have but sacrifice for financial interest,” said Morrill Cody in Publishers Weekly (1262).

As a publisher, Beach gained fame but lost financial security. Her publishing of Joyce's Ulysses may not have made money for her, but it did help her achieve international fame. If business success is equated with income, the venture was a failure, in part because Joyce took more money from the till than any “advance” would have warranted. Also, Beach violated almost every tenet of a successful publishing house, according to Michael Joseph, especially the rules that say “all firms unable to operate on a steady margin of profit should sink their individualism and … cut down on unnecessary costs”; “economic considerations alone will determine the prices” (198-99). But history judges her a truly great publisher because she intervened with Darantière for months in order to get him to print proofs over and over until Joyce had written fully a third more of Ulysses on the proofs themselves. She indeed “enabled” the greatness of this novel.

In her study of alternative publishing, Sally Dennison points out that the printing of books was originally done by booksellers, before publishing companies existed: “Milton's Paradise Lost, Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, and all of Shakespeare's works were originally published by booksellers.” Alternative publication keeps control with the writer, and when the alternative publisher is a bookstore, she adds, their means of distribution and promotion are great advantages (77). Joyce was indeed fortunate. Because Monnier took over the publication of the French translation of Ulysses, he was able to work for several years with the translators to ensure an authoritative translation of the difficult novel.

The full story of getting the chapters typed, preselling subscriptions to the book in order to pay the printer, and selling and smuggling the books has been fully told in Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation (Fitch). The final word should be Beach's: there were “dreadful problems” involved in the publication, she wrote in an unpublished speech she delivered in Brussels not long before her death (Sylvia Beach Papers, Box 180). For a decade she reissued the novel, through eleven printings or editions. “Ulysses was her trial, her torture, and finally her triumph,” said Hugh Ford in Published in Paris, his history of expatriate publishers. “It brought Shakespeare and Company a second celebrity, a living bard, who turned the shop into a literary shrine. It burdened our literature with a work of extraordinary versatility. It canonized Sylvia Beach” (33).

She also published two other titles for Joyce: Pomes Penyeach, his second volume of poetry, and Our Exagmination round his Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress, a collection of essays on the book that would later be published as Finnegans Wake. She designed the cover of the volume, a circular wheel, with the name of each contributor forming a spoke. Because the novel was still being written and portions of it were appearing serially in transition, Our Exag (as they called it) sold poorly and remained in boxes in the shop for years. Poor business judgment, Michael Joseph might say.

Beach handled all the business of translations of Joyce's work, paid his bills, arranged his appointments, and handled the press—a decade of service to Joyce, his work, and his family (Fitch). Brenda Maddox, the biographer of Nora Joyce, has since concurred that Joyce “exploit[ed] everyone around him while [remaining] convinced that he was being persecuted.” For the entire Joyce family, Maddox adds, Shakespeare and Company was bank, “ticket agency, post office, secretarial service, and customs house” (234-35). The personal and professional Joyce business was nearly a full-time job, but Beach also helped edit two French journals; ran her daily lending library, bookstore, and salon; offered visiting writers an informal tea room, rental agency, post office, and bank; and presented her French customers with informal lectures on American literature.

The banking and taxes involved in selling, lending, and publishing were solely Beach's responsibility, and one for which she was not temperamentally suited. She learned to keep the tax man at bay, in typical French fashion, by keeping two sets of books. When she faced a new printing of Ulysses, she borrowed from her sister Holly or her mother. As her ledger books reveal, she kept operational expenses very low; she paid small amounts for errands, shutter raising, window washing, carpentry, stove repair, taxi, and stamps. She used an old-fashioned copper balance for weighing books for postage. In addition to her own records, she kept the finances for her mother, when she was visiting Europe, and for George Antheil, the American composer who rented one of her upstairs rooms and for whom she collected funds. She was also sales agent for a number of writers, including Lawrence and McAlmon.

Shakespeare and Company was also a salon and meeting place, a service that obviously encouraged business. When she presented a reading, she incurred printing costs for the announcements (except for the reading by Hemingway, who vacillated about his performance until it was too late to print formal announcements), the renting of chairs, and the food and drink that Monnier prepared for the reception afterward in their apartment. Edith Sitwell came from London for the first reading, Eliot for one of the last. Most of the readings were given by and for French writers—including Gide, Valéry, and Romains. The readings were infrequent, except during Gide's campaign to save Shakespeare and Company in the 1930s, but the small informal discussions and meetings were spontaneous and frequent. Herbert Lottman claims that both Beach and Monnier held “nonstop open house” in their shops at rue de l'Odéon (29). Beach had a facility for being a hostess that stemmed from both parsonage life and early feminine training, but she could be very prickly when her hard work was interrupted by fools.

To the idealistic observer, running a bookshop and library may seem romantic, a high calling. In reality, it is dirty, hard work. Beach was no dabbler in the arts or salon life; she had to support herself. The business was a necessity. Using a small legacy from her mother, she opened her own business on November 17, 1919. She never expressed a desire to marry—the shop would provide her living. She preferred the company of women, who allowed her her freedom. She was completely responsible for her own business. Lifting books was backbreaking; opening boxes cut up her hands; riding her bike across town to customs kept her face ruddy; tying string, pasting labels, dusting books, typing letters, and building fires in the stove dirtied her body and clothes; calculating the finances in three currencies and typing dozens of letters a week strained her eyes and exacerbated her migraine headaches. Jean Henley, an assistant who worked for her in the 1930s, remembers how heavy were the boxes of cheap books that had to be hauled outside to the front windows in the morning and carried back in at night. In short, it was monotonous, lonely, and fatiguing work. Hugh Ford says that her success was “five percent accident and ninety-five percent hard toil.” It was, he adds, “sheer donkey work” (“Publishing in Paris” 66). Monnier called their work “drudgery [la corvée]” (13).

In addition to intuition and hard work, she had at her command a generous portion of common sense and pragmatism. Sisley Huddleston said she was “eminently practical” (208). This pragmatism—and her creative mixing of English and French idioms—endeared her to the French; for many, she was the quintessential American. Both a feminist and a practical Yankee, she needed little, and would have worn the same suit for years if her family and friends had allowed it. No trailing skirts or thin-soled shoes would hobble her. She wore short skirts (for that day) with pockets—a businessman had to have pockets, she explained (Herrick)—sensible shoes, and a large hat to protect her from the elements. She had expressed scorn for the delicate women wearing impractical shoes during her Red Cross days in Serbia (and later in internment camp in World War II). As a girl she had subscribed to Suffragette magazine and expressed outrage and admiration for the English suffragettes who endured torture.² As she had roamed through Spain and Italy in the years prior to World War I, so she rode her bicycle (maybe the first instrument of emancipation for women) around Paris on her errands—enjoying the freedom allowed her as a foreigner, proud to be a productive and independent woman.

Perhaps her greatest asset in business was her strong and charismatic personality, unrecognized by male historians and critics such as Ezra Pound, Malcolm Cowley, Richard Ellmann, and Hugh Kenner, who have portrayed her as a passive handmaiden to the great James Joyce. Those who knew her well testified to her energy, stubborn will, playful but sharp wit, and loyalty (the latter a parsonage trait). “She left one with a memory of solid exhilaration,” says Leslie Katz (Aug. 1, 1977). She had a way of talking intimately that made one feel the center of her universe. As early as 1929, Wambly Bald said in the Paris edition of the Chicago Tribune that “the charming personality of Sylvia Beach” was the “chief asset” of the “Left Bankers' Trust Co. [that is, the ‘unincorporated’ Montparnasse artistic life],” and her bookshop he called “the favored social club of the literati” (2). Jackson Mathews and Yves Bonnefoy said that friends collected her quips and multilingual coinages. Glenway Wescott said she, like Hemingway and Picasso, had “a rather light, pointed, winged, toxic, and quotable way of talking” (196).

Although Beach was born into what her friend Bryher called “the last group to grow up under the formidable discipline” (203) of the Victorian era and was reared in a Protestant parsonage with all its attendant traditionalism, she did not have a traditional view of women. Several factors made her receptive to early-century feminism. She was the middle of three sisters, with no brothers to contend with for attention. Her mother, married at a very early age to an older minister, soon resented her marital and parsonage roles and took refuge in Europe and the art world. She encouraged her daughters to do the same. Two of the girls (Sylvia and Cyprian, an actress) were lesbians who had long-term relationships. The oldest (Holly) married late in life and lived a traditional bourgeois life in Greenwich, Connecticut. Sylvia's closest friends were always women, including Monnier, with whom she lived, and Bryher, the English novelist Winifred Ellerman, who lived with the poet H. D. (Nearly half a century of letters between Bryher and Beach reveal their deep loyalty and shared feminist views.)

Beach had no husband or family wealth behind her. She was the boss, with all the freedom and responsibility that title implies. Not surprisingly, she frequently referred to herself in the masculine gender as a hardworking “businessman” or “the tired working man” in letters to her family. Educated to a polarized view of gender roles, she chose what she called “man's work” (Sylvia Beach Papers, Boxes 6, 9, 12). In her world only men worked hard in business and took sole responsibility for their lives. Yet in an early draft of her memoirs, she also compares her endless responsibilities to a female occupation: There is “no harder life than the bookseller's,” she says, it is “as bad as the housewife's with its ramifications and continual interruptions” (Sylvia Beach Papers, Box 166).

Both Beach and Monnier supported themselves solely by their businesses, though the Beach family occasionally rescued one of their daughter's publishing projects and the Monnier family sent food from their farm near Chartres. Beach may have referred to Shakespeare and Company as a “business,” but she began it on faith and operated it as a calling. Her business differed from others for two reasons: she was a woman and she was a minister's daughter. Thinking of her nine generations of pastoral and missionary ancestors, she regarded her work as literary missionary work. Monnier, who referred to herself as a religieuse ancienne and wrote eloquently about the calling of the seller of books, testified that Beach had “aimed at the kingdom of God, the rest was given to me as a surplus” (13). Beach, the minister's atheist daughter, rarely used such explicit spiritual references. Yet she lived ascetically, as Benstock notes, and “exuded … missionary zeal” (206). “Business, for us, has a moving and profound meaning,” wrote Monnier in 1920. A bookseller must have an “immediate and intuitive understanding” of the persons who enter her shop and a union with “a soul made up of all ideas and all images” (69-70). This “soul” lived in Odéonia.

Unlike such male bookshop owners as Edward Titus on the Left Bank and what she called the “big junk shops”—Brentano's, W. H. Smith's, and Galignani's—on the Right Bank, she did not stock expensive leather-bound editions of the classics. Readers, not collectors, were drawn to her door. She could work as hard as they, probably harder, but her driving motive was not financial. Hers was a selected stock. “I got everything I liked myself to share with others in Paris” (21). She dismissed one book, with characteristic wit, because it was “totally lacking in vitamins.” Contrary to the rules of success, she specialized in poetry and the avant-garde, and her choices helped to form critical opinion. She had “scorn for the standardized predilections” of the masses, said Herbert Gorman, and she kept the “chaff of letters” from her shelves. All her books and periodicals, he added, had “good intentions” (285).

Though she once compared the business of selling books to selling shoes, her business was more an art form, more personal and intuitive. And to the surprise of young assistants Eleanor Oldenberger (now Herrick) and Hélène Moschos, she did not try very hard to sell her stock. She encouraged browsing and borrowing. Occasionally, according to Herrick, she tried to talk a customer out of buying a book—as if she hated to part with it. Such behavior indicates that her intentions were not primarily financial or characteristically masculine.

She chose to be both elitist and amateur. “The amateur, the true amateur,” wrote Monnier in “Number One” of her Gazette, “follows only his taste. His acquisitions enrich not his pocketbook but his person, they bring him happiness in the true sense of the word.” Monnier, like Beach, did not want to speculate financially on books or make her shop a “stock exchange for books” (141-42).

Though a literary success—in getting the word printed, sold, and distributed—Shakespeare and Company was almost a financial failure. She barely kept it afloat as she sailed between two world wars; and she did not franchise any branches—except spiritually. Since her death, five shops with that name have opened to carry on the spirit of Shakespeare and Company in cities around the world: Rome, Vienna, Paris, Manhattan, and Berkeley. In fact, she skirted bankruptcy frequently, for Joyce took every loose franc. The small loans from her mother and sister and, finally in the 1930s, a fundraising campaign by André Gide and a quarterly endowment by Bryher kept the doors open. The shop was, in fact, a nonprofit enterprise—literary charity work, as she liked to call it, acknowledging the work often designated for women, but work that, in her case, she chose. Hers was a kind of Bohemian sainthood and she a desanctified saint, the self-defrocked progeny of nine generations of ministers. Though she called herself a businessman, she qualified the role—which was both gender-based and secular—by caring nothing for money, success, fans, or bores—all of which a businessman must cultivate and endure if he is to “succeed.” Physically perhaps she was a Geneva Protestant—combining business and living in the same building—but without the profit motive or the head for business. An amusing illustration of her casual business practices is evident in the following message from the Irish-born Frank Harris, best known for his controversial (and unreliable) autobiography, My Life and Loves, in three volumes: “Dear Miss Sylvia, business and you are poles apart: thank God! You've sent me accounts with no years marked, and you discover 50 of my books in a ‘cobbler's remise’ and you've lost only 3 and you mean to pay me for them! forget it—please.” Several months later, he added: “I am more content to be in your hands and I hate ordinary business people” (Sylvia Beach Papers, Box 120).

“The person who can bring to an ‘ordinary’ profession a sense of dedicated vocation, restores to that profession its genius,” says Katz in his tribute to Beach. “Lincoln was a politician, Melville a seaman, Thoreau a camper. She was a bookseller” (“Meditations” 82). Katz is describing an “artist”—one who restores to a profession its genius—“one who,” says the OED, “makes of his craft a ‘fine art.’” She was an artist in part because she wrote her memoirs and translated Henri Michaux's A Barbarian in Asia and other works by Eliot, Valéry, McAlmon, and Bryher. But more important, she was a creative artist of the environment and an artist of relationships. Her greatest creative expression was a place called Shakespeare and Company, for like an architect or sculptor she expressed the beautiful in visible form. It was her greatest work of art, from the fabric on the walls, the antique furniture, the Serbian rugs on the hardwood floors, the photographs over the fireplace, to the warmth of the little stove—a creative space illuminated further by the artist's personality. Dressed in velvet jacket and neck scarf, she looked like a character from a Colette novel. Katherine Anne Porter gives this description of the artist of this place:

When I first saw [Sylvia], in the early spring of 1932, her hair was still the color of roasted chestnut shells, her light golden brown eyes … were … acutely attentive, and they sparkled upon one rather than beamed, as gentle eyes are supposed to do. She was … a delightful presence not accountable to any of the familiar attributes of charm. Her power was in the unconscious, natural radiation of her intense energy and concentration upon those beings and arts she loved. She loved her hundreds of friends, and they loved her … each sure of his special cell in the vast honeycomb of her heart. … Her genius was for friendship; her besetting virtue, generosity … and courage that assured even Hemingway.

(54)

Among the two dozen women who actively created or ran businesses or salons for the arts in Paris during the first four decades of this century in Paris, Beach worked the hardest and had the most contacts. The salons of Stein and Barney were active before Beach arrived in Paris, but they served only artists and, then, only limited circles. Because Shakespeare and Company was open long hours (9 A.M.-12:30 P.M. and 2-7 P.M.), all international groups, even warring factions, could find a time to enter its doors. One of the rare exceptions was Stein, who withdrew her library membership during the Joyce years of the bookshop, but returned in the 1930s to have her Plain Editions books sold there. Beach outlived the other businesses, operating the company for twenty-two years—even longer unofficially, for she lent books from her apartment and continued translating and corresponding with writers around the world until her death in 1962. In comparison, the little presses of Cunard and Harrison and the little magazines of Gilliam, Anderson, and Heap were short-lived. Some of the women (and all of the expatriate men) fled Europe during World War II.³ Only her French partner, Monnier, ran her business longer than did Beach. Monnier died in 1955; Stein had died in 1946, long after she had stopped her regular salon; and among all these expatriate women, only Toklas (1965), Barney (1972), and Gilliam (1979) outlived Beach in Paris.

Since the 1983 publication of the biography of Beach and her bookshop, there have been several books about this period that reassess the contributions of women, including Beach, to modernism. Benstock and Maddox, in particular, pay serious attention to Beach. Also, Bonnie Kime Scott, in Joyce and Feminism, places Beach among the “new free women … mature and capable” whom Joyce knew (115). There remains an occasional condescending remark that echoes the earlier male critics of the modernist period. Mary Lynn Broe, for example, links Beach with Monnier, Crosby, and Cunard, as women who were “assigned” the “niche” as “the women muses and enablers of male modernism … the handmaidens to James Joyce, Henry Miller, and other male Modernists” (59). Words such as enablers and handmaidens might imply a criticism of their efforts to publish the work of men. Had they published, edited, and translated only women, however, they would have been turning aside both art and business.

Beach reconciled the seeming dichotomy between art and business. It is not just that poets and novelists need publishers, bookstores, and readers—as composers need players, and painters their galleries. She did more than perform a service; she linked the word to the marketplace. Thomas Mann, in tribute to his American publisher, Alfred Knopf, acknowledged in 1940 the lofty role of this intermediary between art and commerce: “The publisher is not a soloist of spiritual exertion, but the conductor of the orchestra, whereas the author, in his public loneliness, with only himself to rely on, hemmed in of necessity by his ego, struggles to do his best. … What a glorious occupation, this mixture of business sense and strategic friendship with the spirit!”

Beach was the conductor of the orchestra, to use Mann's metaphor, for she directed her business activities in the service of the literary spirit.

Notes

1. Sales of English titles, which constituted two-thirds of the sales, are more difficult to ascertain because many sales notations simply say “Tauchnitz”—the cheap German editions of the classics that she kept in the outside window box.

2. Sylvia and Eleanor (later called Cyprian) Beach exchanged enthusiastic letters and articles about what they called the “Votes for Women” movement (Sept. 26, 1913, and Feb. 26, 1914). Sylvia Beach Papers, Box 1.

3. In the first half of this century, the foreign women were the first to come to Paris (Barney arrived in 1902, Stein in 1903, Edith Wharton in 1906, Beach in 1916) and the last to leave. They were, Glenway Wescott remarked to Kay Boyle, “more completely abroad than the rest of us” (Cody and Ford 169).

Works Cited

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———. Shakespeare and Company. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1966.

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———. “The Voyage de Grece.” Mercure de france 349 (Aug.-Sept. 1963): 28-33.

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———, with Hugh Ford. Women of Montparnasse. New York: Cornwall Books, 1984.

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———. Published in Paris: American and British Writers, Printers, and Publishers in Paris, 1920-1939. New York: Macmillan, 1975.

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———. “Meditations on Sylvia Beach.” Mercure de france 349 (Aug.-Sept. 1963): 82-85.

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