The reason for Beach’s leeriness was that her greatest fame came as a publisher of sensational fiction. She would like it known that she is not a publisher.” 1 Don’t, furthermore, try to tempt her with the information that such a work of yours is erotic, and certain to shock the sensibilities of the vice commissions.

“Don’t ask her to publish your latest novel or the history of your life or other masterpiece. “There is just one thing that has been banned definitely from her list of activities,” the Times added. The New York Times described the proprietor as follows: “Sylvia Beach, the slight young woman in mannish attire, with bobbed hair, keen, level eyes, lips both firm and sensitive, who is ready to welcome visitors on almost any morning or afternoon.” As the bookseller to Paris’s expatriate community, Beach found herself at the center of a social network that called upon her not only as a bookseller and librarian but as a job finder, postmaster, house hunter, social chair, banker, counselor and manuscript reader. For some twenty years, this was the destination if you wanted English books in Paris, but it was also a locus of drink and conversation, a place, on days when your writing ran dry, where you could go and be seen to be a writer. A small kitchenette stood just out of view, ready to discharge refreshments. The walls bore likenesses of Blake, Whitman, and Poe, as well as Oscar Wilde in his usual Byzantine splendor. Beneath the rows and rows of books stood a warm stove, squashy chairs, a table scattered with current magazines. Inside, the store presented the air of a domestic parlor. The front windows displayed rows of covers bearing the names Chaucer, Shakespeare, Eliot, and Joyce. The store was called Shakespeare and Company out front hung a shingle bearing a portrait of the Bard. During the nineteen-twenties, the literary capital of the United States was a bookstore on the Left Bank in Paris, on an alleyway off the Boulevard St.

Sylvia beach whitman