Paris in the Twenties.
Inscribed to a publisher and friend
Beach, Sylvia. Shakespeare and Company. London: Faber and Faber, 1959.
8vo.; bright blue cloth; stamped in gilt and black; dust-jacket printed with a photograph of Adrienne Monnier in front of Shakespeare and Company; faded; edgeworn, with an inch-long tear at the top of the spine, not affecting text. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
First edition of Beach’s memoir; with a publisher’s advertisement on the lower flap of the dust-jacket, listing books written by James Joyce and Djuna Barnes. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: For my dear friends Dorothy and Desmond Harmsworth “Harrrwmsworth” of the Paris days with much love/Sylvia/at Lume Lodge, Egham vii-23-60. With a pencil note, presumably in Dorothy Harmsworth’s hand on the rear endpaper, noting “Valery Larbaud 64”; this annotation corresponds to a pencil highlight of text on page 64, relating to Larbaud.
Boxed together with:
[Usis Gallery] Paris in the Twenties. An Exhibition of Souvenirs of British, French and American Writers from Shakespeare and Company. London: Usis Gallery, June 20-July 24, 1960.
8vo.; white wrappers, printed in black and blue; foxed; with a photograph of Beach in front of Shakespeare and Company; stapled. Together with original postmarked envelope, addressed by Beach to Lord Harmsworth.
First edition of this catalogue celebrating Shakespeare and Company. A presentation copy, inscribed on the title page: This very incomplete record with Sylvia’s apologies to Desmond and Dorothy Harmsworth. Lume Lodge, Egham/vii-22-60.
Desmond Harmsworth published literary editions under his eponymous press, and was also a poet and artist. He married Dorothy Heinlein in 1926. In their finding aid for the Harmsworth papers, Princeton University describes Harmsworths’s stamp on literary history and his connection to Sylvia Beach:
[Harmsworth] may be best known for the 1932 limited edition of James Joyce's Pomes Penyeach, illustrated by Joyce's daughter Lucia, which Harmsworth co-published with the Obelisk Press of Paris following Sylvia Beach's first edition of Joyce's poems in 1927. Desmond and Dorothy Harmsworth knew Sylvia Beach (1887-1962) who, in turn, knew Stuart Gilbert (1883-1969), the British author, editor and translator who moved to Paris in 1925 following his retirement as a judge on the Court of Assizes in Burma. Beach became acquainted with Stuart Gilbert through his interest in a French translation of Joyce's Ulysses, and she introduced him to Joyce.
Beach, born Nancy Woodbridge Beach, was a publisher, translator and the proprietor of Shakespeare and Company in Paris. She is considered to be a champion of literary modernism. Her father, Sylvester, was a Presbyterian minister and her mother, Eleanor, was a painter and musician. Beach was educated in public schools, and then briefly at a private girl’s school in Lausanne, when her father temporarily moved the family to France to act as the assistant pastor of the American Church in Paris; she did not go to college. After high school, Beach traveled to Europe, where she visited France, Spain and Italy, and even worked as a Red Cross volunteer in Serbia, during WWI.
Beach met her lifelong companion, bookselling inspiration and business partner Adrienne Monnier in 1917, after Beach saw a review that mentioned one could purchase poet Paul Fort’s Vers et Prose at “A. Monnier’s bookshop,” which Beach had never heard of before; she decided to visit the shop and was warmly welcomed by Monnier. Beach had toyed with the idea of opening a bookshop in New York or London, but after meeting Monnier she realized that Paris – with its low rents and considerable expatriate population – would be a better place to start a business. Beach’s shop, like Monnier’s, included a lending library and was a place where writers could gather and give readings. Visitors included Andre Gide, Paul Valery, Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Katherine Anne Porter, William Carlos Williams, Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and James Joyce.
Beach’s greatest achievement was being the first publisher of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922), in spite of the charges of obscenity against the book and her limited financial means. Beach and Joyce proofread the book together, and Beach arranged for the printing, which was delayed considerably due to Joyce’s habit of making changes and adding to the manuscript; over the course of his revisions he expanded the original manuscript by nearly a third. Beach went on to publish the next ten editions of the book, finally relinquishing any rights she had, without compensation, so Joyce could have the book published in America by Random House in 1934. Beach published other books by or about Joyce: Pomes Penyeach (1927), and a collection of critical essays on Finnegan’s Wake, Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (1929).
Beach was a translator, with Monnier, of Bryher’s Paris, 1900 (1938) into French; the translator of Henri Michaux’s A Barbarian in Asia (1949) into English; and the author of Ulysses in Paris (1956). She also contributed to periodicals including Mercure de France, Navire d’argent (a literary review founded by Monnier), Kenyon Review and the Saturday Review.
In 1942, when Paris was occupied by the Germans, Beach closed the store and hid the inventory in her apartment, located upstairs. She later spent six months at an internment camp at Vittel for British and American women. After the war, Beach did not reopen Shakespeare and Company, but she remained living in her apartment on the rue de l’Odeon. She died there in 1962.
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