Shakespeare and Company Bookplate

I mentioned yesterday that I’m reading Shakespeare and Company by Sylvia Beach. It’s a memoir of her years in Paris as an American English-language bookstore and lending library proprietess. She is perhaps best known as the first publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses.

I’ve come across some lovely quotes that I can’t help but share:

17: It was great fun getting my little shop ready for the book business… a “specialist” came and painted the name “Shakespeare and Company” across the front. That name came to me one night as I lay in bed. My “Partner Bill,” as my friend Penny O’Leary called him, was always, I felt, well disposed toward my undertaking; and, besides, he was a best seller.

21: My lending library was run on what Adrienne called, though I never knew why, “le plan americain.” It would have horrified an American librarian, with her catalogues and card indexes and mechanical appliances. It was quite suitable for a library such as mine. There was no catalogue – I preferred to let people find out for themselves how much was lacking; no card index – so unless you could remember, as Adrienne, with her wonderful memory, was able to do, to whom all your books were lent, you had to look through all the members’ cards to find out what had become of a volume.

26: Mr. Pound was not the kind of writer who talks about his, or, for that matter, anyone’s, books; at least with me. I found the acknowledged leader of the modern movement not bumptious. In the course of our conversations, he did boast, but of his carpentry.

bumptious: offensively self-assertive

35: As we ate and drank, I noticed one guest who was not drinking at all. He resisted Spire’s repeated efforts to fill his glass; finally, he turned his glass upside down, and that settled it. The guest was James Joyce. He got very red when Pound began to line up all the bottles on the table in front of his plate.

36: “What do you do?” Joyce inquired. I told him about Shakespeare and Company. The name, and mine, too, seemed to amuse him, and a charming smile came to his lips. Taking a small notebook out of his pocket and, as I noticed with sadness, holding it very close to his eyes, he wrote down the name and address. He said he would come to see me.

Could that “small notebook” have been a Moleskine?

65: Ulysses, like everything else of Joyce’s, was written entirely by hand. He used blunt black pencils – he found the ones he wanted at Smith’s in Paris – and pencils of different colors to distinguish the parts he was working on. Fountain pens he didn’t understand at all. They bewildered him. Once I found him struggling to fill one, covering himself with ink as he did so.

81: Though the question who has influenced such and such a writer has never bothered me, and the adult writer doesn’t stay awake at night to wonder who has influenced him, I do think Hemingway readers should know who taught him to write: it was Ernest Hemingway. And, like all authentic writers, he knew that to make it “good,” as he called it, you had to work.

83: As a bookseller and librarian, I paid more attention to titles perhaps than others who simply rush past the threshold of a book without ringing the bell. I think Hemingway’s titles should be awarded first prize in any contest. Each of them is a poem, and their mysterious power over readers contributes to Hemingway’s success.

106: Bryher thought books should be big and flat so that you could sit on them.

To be continued in Pt. 2.