![]() ![]() ![]() But the missives in “The Letters of Sylvia Beach,” edited by Keri Walsh, have an unvarnished charm all their own. As it happened, she also had “pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip,” Hemingway wrote in “A Moveable Feast.” “No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.” Beach’s story has been told before, in her appealing memoir “Shakespeare & Company” (1959) and more exactingly in Noel Riley Fitch’s “Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation” (1983). She was a prizewinning translator of Paul Valéry and Henri Michaux. For her favorites she operated as banker, post office, clipping service and cheering section. ![]() Scott Fitzgerald, Janet Flanner and the poet H. Her friends she introduced many of them to one another included Joyce, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, F. Her bookstore, packed with fresh journals, good sunlight and plump armchairs, was a sanctuary for the era’s best writers, ex-pat and otherwise. She coined the term Bloomsday to describe the day on which the novel is set. If the world’s dwindling independent bookstores have a patron saint, an exemplar to cling to in moments of duress, she is Sylvia Beach (1887-1962), the soulful and fearless owner of Shakespeare & Company, the English-language bookstore she founded in Paris in 1919 and operated on the Left Bank until the German occupation during World War II.īeach was the first publisher of James Joyce’s “Ulysses” and helped smuggle copies to readers in the United States. ![]()
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