Shakespeare and Company by Sylvia BEACH (Presentation)
BEACH, Sylivia. Shakespeare and Company. Paris: Mercure de France, 1962.
Inscribed by Sylvia Beach to Gisèle Freund: ‘For Gisèle - with love to her photographer from Sylvia’.
This is the first French edition of Sylvia Beach’s memoir. The book is illustrated with black-and-white photos, including three by Gisèle Freund featuring James Joyce, Sylvia Beach, and Adrienne Monnier at Shakespeare and Company in the late 1930s.
Sylvia Beach (1887-1962) was an American expatriate in France and the founder of Shakespeare and Company—the Parisian bookshop of the Lost Generation. Her clients and friends included Hemingway, Scott F. Fitzgerald, and Gertrude Stein. In 1922 Sylvia Beach made literary history as the publisher of James Joyce’s Ulysses. Gisèle Freund (1908-2020) was a young German-Jewish refugee to Paris in mid-1930s when she became an important friend of Sylvia Beach and her partner, Adrienne Monnier. Freund, a photojournalist and photographer, took informal shots as well as formal portraits of the famous writers, artists and personalities associated with Sylvia Beach, providing a rich visual record of the Shakespeare and Company set in the 1930s. Her subjects included James Joyce, Paul Valéry, André Gide, T.S. Eliot, André Breton, Colette, Marcel Duchamp, and Walter Benjamin.
240pp; b/w photos. 8vo, original printed wrappers, spine slightly browned. Some pages unopened. Several pencil markings to text. A very good copy. A stunning presentation.