A Tale of Two Bookshops
They had the best of times, they had the worst of times. Parisian bookshop owners Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach played a major part in world literature from their shops, facing each other on Rue de l’Odeon in Paris’s left bank.
Adrienne Monnier was the first woman to open (as opposed to inheriting) a bookshop in Paris when La Maison des Amis des Livres in 1915. Four years later she encouraged Sylvia Beach – who was to become her life partner – to open Shakespeare and Company. Two years later Sylvia’s shop moved across the road from Adrienne’s. The two bookshops had a similar ethos – to support writers and help make their work available to the public – but Monnier’s shop concentrated on French artists while Beach’s was to become a haven for the Lost Generation of American and English speaking authors.
More people have heard of Beach nowadays. As well as the bookshop’s name having continued past her death in 1962 in new premises set up by George Whitman, she is famous for having published the first edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses. However Monnier published the book’s first French translation.
While Beach’s shop was haunted by Hemingway, D H Lawrence, Ezra Pound, T S Elliot and Gertrude Stein among many others. If they couldn’t afford to buy books they could always borrow them from her lending library.
Across the road, Apollinaire and Breton and the other surrealists would meet and Monnier’s magazine Le Navire d’Argent featured their writing along with other native authors and translations of Beach’s customers. As both American and a surrealist Man Ray frequented both. The Potasson’s – inspired by poems by Leon Paul Fargue and including Eric Satie – met at Monnier’s shop.
The golden years ended when the German occupation started and Sylvia Beach was interred, She was soon released and moved back with Monnier where they suffered hunger and cold and supported the Resistance. Hemingway “liberated” Shakespeare and Co when he entered the city with the allies but it didn’t reopen. Monnier committed suicide in 1955 and after some more years in Paris Beach opened the Martello Tower in Dublin as a Joyce Museum.
I was reminded of their story reading Hugh Ford’s Published in Paris, bought from another great female owned bookshop – Barnabees in Westleton. The book fills a gap in my reference books on the arts in Paris from 1830’s Bohemia to the Beat Hotel of the 1960s. During virtually the whole period the city has been a magnet for American talent as well as European and the cross fertilisation spawned some of the greatest art movements of two centuries. Beach and Monnier played a key part in many of them.
