Shakespeare and Company

Everyone else wrote their Paris memoirs first; Beach, characteristically, waited until she could be generous. Published by Harcourt, Brace in 1959, three years before her death, her account of the little shop at 12 rue de l'Odéon is the testimony of the woman who ran the room the whole movement passed through — the lending library where Hemingway borrowed his education, the mail drop, the bank of last resort, and the publishing house of exactly one book, which happened to be Ulysses.

The Joyce chapters are the spine — the subscriptions, the Dijon printers, the decade of serving genius and its expenses — told with a briskness that underplays how much the venture cost her, in money and in rights she quietly surrendered when Random House took the book to America. Around them moves the whole cast: Gide and Valéry from one Paris, Fitzgerald and Stein from the other, and the 'bunnies' — her word for the lending-library members — from both.

It ends with the war: the German officer who threatened to confiscate her last copy of Finnegans Wake, the shop dissolved overnight into an upstairs apartment, internment, and the December 1944 afternoon when a jeep-borne Hemingway, in uniform, roared up the rue de l'Odéon to 'liberate' it. The shop never reopened; the book is its afterlife, and the primary source under half of these pages.

The bookseller's own story: how a Princeton minister's daughter opened an American bookshop and lending library at 12 rue de l'Odéon in 1919, and how the little shop became the clubhouse, post office, bank, and publishing house of literary Paris. Beach walks through the whole cast as a hostess rather than a judge — Gide and Valéry from the French side, Hemingway (her favorite) borrowing books he could not buy, Fitzgerald, Stein, and the 'bunnies,' her word for the lending-library members whose cards recorded a generation's reading.

The centerpiece is the great adventure: publishing Ulysses when no commercial house would touch it — the subscriptions, the heroic Dijon printer, Joyce's endless revisions and expenses, the smuggling, the piracy, and the cost, borne by her, of serving a genius. And through every chapter, the shop itself: the lending-library cards, the borrowed money, the writers treating the rue de l'Odéon as a second home for two decades.