Posts

Showing posts from December, 2012

Literature's Mystery Woman

Image
 Remembering a Woman and Her Bookstore   In Paris, there is currently a bookstore named "Shakespeare and Company", but it is only a copy of the original store that was located at 12 Rue de L'Odéon and ran by a woman named Sylvia Beach in the 20s.   Ernest Hemingway described Miss Beach in his book A Moveable Feast and wrote "She had a lively, sharply sculptured face, brown eyes that were as alive as a small animal's and as gay as a young girl's, and wavy brown hair that was brushed back from her fine forehead and cut thick below her ears..."  Hemingway also wrote that Miss Beach "was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip.  No one that I ever knew was nicer to me."   In the year 1917, Sylvia Beach was a student in Paris studying contemporary French literature.  One day, she read an advertisement for work in a bookshop called "La Maison des Amis des Livres" and soon became friends, (and eventually