![]() ![]() She did more to link England, the United States, Ireland, and France than four great ambassadors combined.” I think of this whenever I ponder the role booksellers and bookshops can play during this age of political and ecological turbulence. ![]() As André Chamson wrote about you: “Sylvia Beach carried pollen like a bee. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as André Gide, Paul Valéry, and Louis Aragon, among many others, all bought and borrowed books from you, and attended readings and parties at Shakespeare and Company. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, and F. Your bookshop-first on rue Dupuytren, then around the corner on rue de l’Odéon-became a sanctuary for Anglophone and Francophone writers. ![]() Adrienne would be your companion for decades to come. You had also met Adrienne Monnier, one of the first women in France to found her own bookshop. Soulful and fearless, witty and energetic, you’d been active in the women’s suffrage movement, studied French poetry in Paris, and served with the Red Cross in Serbia during the First World War. You were only 32 but had already lived quite a life. I often wonder if, on that first morning, you could ever have imagined how important your story would be. One hundred years ago this month, you opened the shutters of a small bookshop on rue Dupuytren. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |