Shakespeare and Company

Sometimes the most unpretentious among us are the people who change the world. In Paris there is a bookstore called Shakespeare & Company. Its owner changed the world. We visited it today, but I have to back up.

Sylvia Beach was the quiet daughter of a Presbyterian clergyman in Baltimore. He took advantage of an interdenominational, international exchange program to become the assistant pastor of the American congregation in Paris about the time of World War I. His bookish daughter began to do research in Paris, and made the acquaintance of Adrienne Monnier, who had followed the unusual path of becoming one of the few women proprietors of a bookstore. Upon returning to America, Sylvia Beach opened her own bookstore, but as the Great War ended, she realized that rents were much cheaper in postwar Paris. With Monnier’s blessing, Sylvia opened her own bookstore in Paris at 8 Rue Depuyten (we saw the site today) and called it Shakespeare & Company. Her business flourished, and a few years later she moved. Then she moved again to a place that became a haven for the writers of the Lost Generation—Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Joyce, Edna St. Vincent Millay, James Thurber, Thomas Wolfe, and the list goes on. When starving writers could not pay the rent, she let them flop in the bookstore in exchange for their unpacking, shelving and clerking in the bookstore. When no publisher would touch James Joyce’s Ulysses, Sylvia published it at her own expense. Shakespeare & Company had a reading room where anyone who wished to read a book could sit and do so for as long as they liked.

There is still a reading room with the same rules at Shakespeare & Company. Although it is located in a different building now, the owner tries to follow the same gentle, humane rules that Sylvia Beach began. The current business has no direct connection with Sylvia’s enterprise, except for the name. The owner, however, like Sylvia Beach is an avid reader and a more avid dreamer. He admires Sylvia Beach and attempts to run the bookstore as she would have done were she still alive.

Unfortunately, the company does not allow photographs inside the bookstore, but I can tell my colleagues who graduated from the Baptist Seminary in Wake Forest exactly how it looks and smells. When I went to seminary in 1975 Dick Stevens had a bookstore at the corner of North Main Street and Stadium Drive. There were about four rooms crowded, indeed packed with books from floor to ceiling. God is the only one who understood Dick’s method of filing books, but if you asked him for a book, even one out of print, Dick could take you right to it. He would let you sit and read for hours, even if you never bought the book. Thank God for the gentle spirits who open bookstores.

We felt at home inside Shakespeare & Company today. If you feel at home inside a good book, you would like this place too. If you would like more information about this remarkable woman you can find it at the following link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sylvia_BeachRead more