The Letters of Sylvia Beach edited by Keri Walsh with a Foreword by Noel Riley Fitch

The Letters of Sylvia Beach edited by Keri Walsh with a Foreword by Noel Riley Fitch published by Columbia University Press is a joyous epistolary book and you will discover a lot of fun reading it.

If you want to discover the character, vitality of the creator of  Shakespeare and Company, the famous American bookshop located in Paris, Sylvia Beach, there's no other better way than this one: reading her own written words. Wagons of connections, you won't get lost. At the end of the book a glossary of correspondents will help you if you need some clarification. Yes, because Sylvia Beach, although pictures speak of a shy lady, was a hurricane of joy, interests, plenty of enthusiasm for life, people, news, books, events.

Released years ago, this book is a fresh, beautiful, intelligent and stunning gem for all that people in love for the french adventure started by Sylvia Beach: the creation of an American bookshop to Paris a place, Shakespeare&Co. that was also aggregation, solidarity, mutual help, a literary place where people could breath profound and good culture; a place that meant creativity in motion if we think at the elaboration and contribution given by Sylvia Beach and her collaborators to the final edition of the Ulysses by James Joyce and its publication.
A place, Shakespeare and Company where you would have found suggestions, if you were a potential writer, for trying to understand which publishing houses would have been interested to release your book; a place born for exchanging opinions; a place of books and great readings.


At that time Paris, we are on 1919, was the most important intellectual center for Americans in Europe. If Italy was chosen by Americans for the beauty of lands, warm weather, it was Paris where a lot of still unknown young American writers and painters decided of living in.

The presence of friends and colleagues in Paris meant to Americans an irresistible attraction.

When Sylvia decided to create, thanks also to the support of her companion Adrianne, her mother, her sisters, this bookshop, she was surrounded by Ezra Pound and wife; Ernest Hemingway, still a young author and wife, James Joyce and family, McAlmon, publisher and writer, Francis Scott Fitzgerald and lady, Gertrude Stein and companion.
In this fertile humus, not the baddest one of the world, you agree with me, Shakespeare and Company was born at the number 12 of rue de l'Odeon. It was August 1919.

Sylvia Beach's correspondence is a real joy; we will read her enthusiasm and joy for life, people, events, books, places, experiences.
Pure joy, enthusiastic, she constantly saw the glass half full and was in grade of telling the years and decades she lived in with lightness and vibrant details, without to lose for a second, that joy of donating herself to a distant friend in search of news from her. She lived in this world with enchanted eyes.

She was an avid and solid letter-writer and she took it pretty seriously. When she could not write at the end of the 1930s because of a persistent headache, migraine, she apologized with everyone; when she typed letters apologized with the receiver as well, because not hand-written.

She kept a strong correspondence with all her family members from Princeton, mother, father, siblings, and with so many other friends in the world. Her soul was genuinely enthusiastic.

We will assist thanks to her letters at the main big events of History:  the re-election of Woodrow Wilson as President, a family-friend; the first world war; the arrival of Spanish Flu on 1918 reported by her mother, but also, we will read from her letters, the impressions Sylvia had about working in a farm.

Sylvia lived a privileged life; important friends and connections, she traveled a lot; France but Italy as well: Rapallo, Pistoia, Florence, although her biggest love remained France and Paris. Forever.

If she could not coronate her big love of a romantic french bookshop in the Greenwich Village of New York City, an impressive idea, she made it in Paris. Decades later, read what she wrote about her trip to NYC.

Sylvia preferred to lending books, creating a card for each consumer. The youngest one was a little boy. He read a book per day; the oldest one was a man in a wheelchair.
For everyone Sylvia, thanks to her passion for books, offered an escapism with great readings.

This correspondence starts on Nov 1901 endings when the author dies in 1962: so it doesn't touch just  the history of Shakespeare and Company but also the personal existence of Sylvia Beach; the before and after. We meet along our way the enthusiasm of Sylvia Beach for the publication of the Ulysses by James Joyce, then the arrival of moment of big crisis for the bookshop. In this sense, Sylvia wrote on a letter dated: Jan 12 1934 to Stanislaus Joyce: "There are no Englishmen nor Americans in Paris any more. They have all gone home on account of the exchange and the depression. I wonder how things are in Italy. They are making a great effort  to get visitors there, cheap railway fare and hotels, polite reception etc..."

Sylvia Beach thanks to her old connections received in various phases of her existence financial help for going on with her bookshop, or later when she fell sick and needed to be cured in the USA.

Stamps and pictures of Walt Whitman close to the one of Oscar Wilde (the daughter of Wilde was an affectionate of Shakespeare and Company) and James Joyce chosen for keeping warm and elegant the bookshop, the meeting with Joyce was "fatal" for Sylvia Beach.
She fell, intellectually fell in love for him, and she tried with all herself of helping Joyce in the process of publication of the Ulysses: Shaskepeare and Company became a publishing house.

This one of the Ulysses remains a controversial story because Sylvia Beach tried all her best for helping Joyce, losing at the end all the rights regarding the publication of Ulysses because the contract signed  by the parts, Joyce and Beach, was not formal.

Joyce apart, we will see also some correspondence with Ernest Hemingway helpful in her life in various moments; letters were also sent and received when Adrianne died and Sylvia remained alone and frustrated for the sad departure of her companion of a life.

Impressive the letters about the years of the Second World War conflict and the austerity experienced in Paris by Sylvia Beach. Just people with a lot of money could buy food at the black market, wrote Sylvia.

'Til the end of her life, the character of Sylvia Beach was influential; she met new authors after the second world war conflict, she kept contact with her old friends, now famous and established writers; some of them died in the while, as in the case of Gertrude Stein; her voice, although the new bookshop is not located anymore where the old one was, is still whispering if we think that the new Shakespeare and Company was wanted, opened and owned by George Whitman who named her daughter Sylvia Beach Whitman after Sylvia Beach.
Sylvia Beach Whitman is the new owner of Shakespeare and Company.
The story continues...

Highly recommended, if you love epistolary genre, it's impressive, and if you love Shakespeare and Company :-) Paris and that precise historical moment.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori