Shakespeare and Company, the first English/American bookshop and lending library in Paris, may be the most famous bookshop in history. Today there are at least five bookstores—from Berkeley to Vienna—named in honor of Sylvia Beach's center of French-Anglo-American literary activity in the 1920s and 1930s. Today one can find numerous bookplates of the original Shakespeare and Company in the volumes once owned by her Company, including James Joyce and Ernest Hemingway.

Sylvia Woodbridge Beach (1887-1962), the second of three daughters born into nine generations of American ministers and missionaries, fell in love with Paris when she was a teenager. She settled there in 1916 to indulge in her love of reading. Her friendship with a French woman named Adrienne Monnier enabled her to open an English-language bookstore and lending library in Paris. Monnier was the owner of La Libraire A. Monnier (later La Maison des Amis des Livres) at 7, rue de l'Odéon. Monnier's friends became hers: Paul Valery, Valery Larbaud, Léon-Paul Fargue, Jules Romains, André Gide. They were among her first customers when Shakespeare and Company opened on 17 November 1919 at 8, rue Dupuytren, just around the corner from Monnier's sanctuary.

A year and a half later—in the midst of publishing James Joyce's Ulysses—Beach moved to her larger and permanent location at 12, rue de l’Odéon. By then increasing numbers of foreign artists were gravitating to Paris. Among her first customers were Stephen Vincent Benet, Thornton Wilder, John Peale Bishop, and Gertrude Stein. By the early twenties Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway (“my best cus­tomer”), Sherwood Anderson, John Dos Passes, Djuna Barnes, Wynd­ham Lewis, T. S. Eliot, and George Moore joined the Company.

Shakespeare and Company was chiefly a lending library in those pre-paperback days. The rows of books on every wall were both traditional and avant-garde. She purchased many of the traditional works by British and American writers from secondhand book dealers in Paris and London. From her family in the United States she received more recent titles. She held to a standard of quality and innovation—keeping in mind the customer she wished to reach. Herbert Gorman says she ''kept the chaff of letters out of her shop.”

In the selection of books she followed her own tastes. “I got everything I liked myself, to share with others in Paris,” she writes. She en­joyed recommending books to readers and responded to inquiries with brief lessons in English and American literature. She was also responsive to requests, except when Gertrude Stein complained that she did not stock The Trail of the Lonesome Pine. Beach rejected another book because it was ''totally lacking in vitamins.'' She favored—and one sees this reflected in the records of sales and purchase—William Blake, Herman Melville, James Joyce, Walt Whitman, Joseph Conrad, and T. S. Eliot. As she and Monnier had agreed before the shop opened, Beach carried only English-language titles, Monnier only French.

There was no formal system of lending and no reference numbers or catalogue for her books. Initially she kept only a library card for each member. Therefore, if she had to find out who had borrowed a book, she was obliged to flip through all her members' cards. If the book was not returned, she sent a postcard with a drawing of Shakespeare, her patron, pulling out his hair. No formal procedure—Monnier called it le plan américain—spoiled the intimacy of her library.

Beach cultivated an atmosphere of casual excitement. The casual warmth was reflected in Serbian rugs, a ready teapot, and a gallery of pictures on the wall above the fireplace. In one corner were small chairs and children's books for her little customers. Yet there was excitement in the back room where she chatted with Joyce or Pound. And the review rack held the literary magazines from London, New York, and Paris that would change modern literature. Beach was the chief distributor for the avant-garde presses and little magazines.

Shakespeare and Company was more than a lending library and occasional seller of books. It was clubhouse, post office, bank, and pub­lishing house for the great and soon-to-he-great artists of the twentieth century. She encouraged them to write, influenced their reading, sold their little reviews, served as editor for several French journals, and held readings by the following friends in her room: Edith Sitwell, André Gide, Paul Valéry, T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Stephen Spender, Jean Schlumberger, and Jules Romains. She and Monnier frequently translated French and English works, including (for the first time) T. S. Eliot's “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.”

The primary single achievement of Beach and her shop was the pub­lication of James Joyce's Ulysses, 2 February 1922. Beach agreed to pub­lish it in France, where the typesetters could not read English, after it was declared obscene in the United States. For a decade she published nine of the first eleven printings/editions of Ulysses, as well as Joyce's Pomes Penyeach (1927), his second collection of poetry, and Our Examination Round His Factification of Work in Progress (1929), a collection of critical articles on Joyce's Finnegans Wake.

The fame and contribution of Shakespeare and Company owe something to the timing of the great migration of artists to Paris and to Beach's publication of Ulysses. But the ingredient that leavened the bread of events was Beach herself. Her genius lay in her ability to stimulate the interaction among writers of different languages. She served the arts with a missionary zeal, nurtured artistic talent, and maintained her own identity in a crowd of strong personalities.

The Shakespeare and Company bookplate is made by a woodcut of a bald Shakespeare, probably designed by Charles Winzer, whose initials appear below the sleeve holding the paper. Winzer made the first two signboards (both of which were stolen) for the shop. The third and final sign, made by Marie Monnier (sister of Adrienne), hangs in the Rare Book room at Princeton. This woodcut was used without the ex libris on numerous cards and announcements, such as the prospectus for the publication of Ulysses.

The bookplate of the Sylvia Beach Collection at Princeton University presents this same bald-headed Shakespeare sitting opposite Sylvia Beach, their heads bent over a library table. Superimposed over this intimate scene are the large initials SB and, in script below, the word Paris. Unlike most formal bookplates, this posthumous label captures the human exchange that was the genius of Shakespeare and Company. 

Noel Rily Fitch,

author of Sylvia Beach and

The Lost Generation: A

History of Literary Paris

in the Twenties and Thirties

(Norton)