- Shakespeare & Company - Sylvia Beach, Adrienne Monnier, Eliot, Joyce, Stein
- Three Mountains & Contact - McAlmon, Bird, Pound, Ford, Hemingway
- Black Sun - Crosby, Boyle, Joyce,
Editions Narcisse,
Crosby Continental - Black Manikin & Obelisk - Titus, Nin, Lawrence, Darantiere, Neagoe, Porter
- Other Paris Resources
Sylvia Beach & Shakespeare and Company
Sylvia Beach's bookshop and lending-library on the Left Bank, Shakespeare and Company, was the major distribution point in Paris for English-language modernist books and periodicals, and, with its near-neigbor, Adrienne Monnier's La Maison des Amis des Livres, a central meeting place for the expatriate literary community. Beach had founded her bookshop in 1919 on returning from work in Serbia during the Great War with the American Red Cross. Shown here are an advertisement for the two shops (from one of Monnier's publications), a picture of the bookshop (from a USIS exhibit catalogue, 1960), Beach's account of first meeting James Joyce (from her Ulysses in Paris, 1966), and the first periodical text of T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (from The Dial, 1922), promoted by Beach with a special window-display.
James Joyce's Ulysses
I
n 1921, episodes from Joyce's Ulysses published in the US in the Little Review were judged obscene, and Beach undertook to publish the work in Paris under the imprint of Shakespeare and Company, using Monnier's Dijon printer Maurice Darantierre. The first printing of 1000 copies was rapidly bought up, largely by collectors and dealers. Included here are copies of:
- the first edition, 1922 (title page, limitation from no. 890, F. Scott Fitzgerald's copy, and an inserted inscription by Joyce to Fitzgerald); the library's second copy has the original blue wrappers bound in;
- the 5th printing, 1924 (in white wrappers);
- the 7th printing, 1925 (open to show imprint);
- the 8th printing, 1926 (in blue wrappers, as above);
- and the 10th printing, 1928 (open to show the printing history).
Also shown is a photo of Beach with Joyce, from Sylvia Beach 1887-1962 (Paris: Mercure de France, 1963), and Joyce's Pomes Pennyeach (Paris: Shakespeare and Company, 1927).
James Joyce in transition
Among literary reviews distributed by Shakespeare and Company was the new monthly transition, founded by the American poet and journalist Edward Jolas in 1927, which regularly offered its subscribers fresh installments of Joyce's "Work in Progress" (subsequently Finnegan's Wake). Shown here are the title page and contents lists from number one and number two of the magazine.
This library is a congressionaly designated depository for U.S. government documents. Public access to the government documents collections is guaranteed by public law.