Chambers, Matthew;
(2024)
Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company in the English-Language Book Trade of Interwar Paris.
Logos: Journal of the World Publishing Community
, 34
pp. 31-42.
10.1163/18784712-20240002.
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Abstract
Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company is one of the most famous modernist institutions. Yet, too often the bookshop and its owner are framed as either in assistance to James Joyce, publishing his Ulysses, or as an incomparable hostess. In both framings, Beach is a supporting player and Shakespeare and Company an evocative space of chance encounters with literary greatness. Such framings underserve Beach’s abilities as a bookseller and obscure Shakespeare and Company’s primary function – the lending and selling of books. This essay approaches Shakespeare and Company as an institution in the book trade, and explores how it navigated the English-language market in Paris. By examining Beach’s competition among other sellers and her order records showing how she stocked the shop, Shakespeare and Company is approached as a commercial enterprise. This book trade perspective fleshes out the further dimensions of the bookshop beyond its better-known functions as a single-author publisher and lending library, in order to provide a fuller sense of how it operated as an essential modernist institution for the Paris community.
| Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Title: | Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company in the English-Language Book Trade of Interwar Paris |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| DOI: | 10.1163/18784712-20240002 |
| Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1163/18784712-20240002 |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | © The Author(s), 2024. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Licence (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
| Keywords: | Sylvia Beach; Shakespeare and Company; bookselling; literary modernism; publishing |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL SLASH > Faculty of Arts and Humanities > Dept of Information Studies |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10193513 |
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