You had shown how a true bookseller must also be prepared to be a librarian, a publisher, a PO box, a banker, a hotelier, and-most importantly-a friend to writers and readers. When my father, George Whitman, opened this bookshop in 1951, you were not just a regular visitor but an inspiration. Even when you closed your bookshop in 1941, it was not an act of defeat but of defiance-you would rather see your life’s work shuttered forever than sell Finnegans Wake to a high-ranking Nazi officer. When James Joyce couldn’t find anyone to publish Ulysses-his modernist masterpiece that had been condemned for obscenity-you stepped up. She did more to link England, the United States, Ireland, and France than four great ambassadors combined.” I think of this whenever I ponder the role booksellers and bookshops can play during this age of political and ecological turbulence. As André Chamson wrote about you: “Sylvia Beach carried pollen like a bee. Scott Fitzgerald, as well as André Gide, Paul Valéry, and Louis Aragon, among many others, all bought and borrowed books from you, and attended readings and parties at Shakespeare and Company. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Djuna Barnes, and F. Your bookshop-first on rue Dupuytren, then around the corner on rue de l’Odéon-became a sanctuary for Anglophone and Francophone writers.
Adrienne would be your companion for decades to come.
You had also met Adrienne Monnier, one of the first women in France to found her own bookshop.
Soulful and fearless, witty and energetic, you’d been active in the women’s suffrage movement, studied French poetry in Paris, and served with the Red Cross in Serbia during the First World War. You were only 32 but had already lived quite a life. I often wonder if, on that first morning, you could ever have imagined how important your story would be. One hundred years ago this month, you opened the shutters of a small bookshop on rue Dupuytren.
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