Scenes from the Left Bank –The Paris Bookseller by Kerri Maher

Sylvia Beach was an American woman who founded Shakespeare & Company, an English language bookstore and lending library on Paris's Left Bank, just after World War I. It was located in the Odéon, an area of avant garde writers, artists, and others, near to the Luxembourg Gardens and other major Paris attractions.

Beach's store became a gathering place for American expatriate writers, including Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, plus many others, and also attracted French and British writers and customers. What Beach is most famous for, however, was publishing the Irish writer James Joyce's Ulysses, at a time when it was both rejected by mainstream publishing houses and also banned for its sexual and other explicit content. The United States in particular at that time was under the yoke of the very restrictive and repressive Comstock laws that kept the book from coming into the country through legitimate means.

The Paris Bookseller is also a romance. Sylvia Beach was a lesbian, and found her match of many years in Adrienne Monnier, a French bookseller who ran a shop of her own nearby. The two had a circle of writer friends and acquaintances that included Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas and many others.

The American writers in Paris became known as "The Lost Generation", but they produced some of the most influential fiction of the 20th century. Beach was at the center of their society.

This was an interesting and well-researched novelization of Beach's life, through her 20s into her 40s. While I had heard of her, and her store, and of course read many of the works of her era, this book gave me many new insights into the world she lived and worked in. I realized while reading this book that in 1990 I had stayed in the Odéon Hotel, just across the street from the site of Beach's store. In the lobby of that fairly modest establishment, there was a small painting by Picasso, which is not at all surprising, since he was a part of the art scene that was centered in the area, along with its literary figures. She would have known him as well.  

While not affiliated with the original Paris store, I frequented the Shakespeare & Company bookstore in my early years in Manhattan on New York's Upper West Side at 81st street. It was an artsy store with a late hippie kind of vibe – I'm sure Sylvia Beach would have approved. My perfect Saturday night back then might have included an early movie, followed by a casual dinner, a long browse in the bookstore, and finally a visit to Zabar's temple of appetizing for brunch supplies for the next morning. In those glory days, both of those stores, as well as several foodie destinations, stayed open late as was the neighborhood custom. It had just a little touch of the bohemian and avant garde feeling of Beach's Paris. I'm sure she would have appreciated that homage to her establishment.