Shakespeare and Company.

BEACH, Sylvia.

Item Number: 111488

New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1959.

First edition of Sylvia Beach’s memoir, “particularly valuable for the many insights into Joyce’s work and the authentic personal views it provides of the man himself” (New York Times). Octavo, original cloth, illustrated. Signed by Sylvia Beach on the half-title page. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Milton Glaser.

It was in Sylvia Beach's legendary Paris bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, that "James Joyce's Ulysses was born." In her memoir, Shakespeare and Company, Beach tells her story "with simplicity, freshness and modesty. And in doing so she succeeds in bringing back that whole small—but intensely creative—world around her bookshop and that of her friend, Adrienne Monnier… which was the center of so much French literary activity." Her book "is particularly valuable for the many critical insights into Joyce's work and the authentic personal views it provides of the man himself." After her publication of Ulysses "on Joyce's birthday, Feb. 2, 1922, Shakespeare and Company was known to writers the world over. No one failed to call… but it is finally Joyce whose portrait remains—a shy, quiet, infinitely curious, kindly, generous man… She shows us the artist whose complex existence was given to his work… As Beach says, 'He treated people invariably as his equals'" (New York Times).