The ‘Wicklow Chief’ and the Irish Rebellion of 1798 Remembered in a Sydney Coastal Cemetery

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Biographical, Military history, Regional History, Society & Culture

The first time I wandered through Waverley Cemetery in the chic, beachside eastern suburbs of Sydney I was somewhat bemused to find in the midst of the congested maze of gravesites of famous Australians—poets, politicians and judges, sports men and women, aviation pioneers among others—a large, impressive marble, bronze and mosaic memorial to the martyrs of the 1798 Irish Rebellion.

Honouring the sacrifices of 1798
The connexion only became clear to me later when I did some research on the ‘mystery’. The nexus linking the heroic but lost cause of nascent Éireannach 18th century insurrection against the indignities of English rule to a Sydney cemetery turned out to be one Michael Dwyer, whose remains along with those of his wife are buried within the grand monument. The memorial was constructed for the 100-year anniversary (1898) of the uprising, the plot and monument paid for by the local Irish community in New South Wales.

Michael Dwyer, hero of Wicklow resistance

Dwyer in the ‘Pantheon’ of Irish independence heroes
Native Wicklow man ‘Captain’ Dwyer fought in the ‘98 Rebellion, later leading an effective guerrilla campaign against the British army in the Wicklow Mountains. Dwyer held out till 1803, earning himself the sobriquet “the Wicklow Chief” before his eventual capture and transportion to the NSW colony (not America as he had been promised). In any event Dwyer got off pretty lightly compared to many of the rebels – given his freedom and a land grant of 100 acres on Cabramatta Creek. Dwyer’s life in Australia was a roller coaster of a ride and colourful to put it mildly…twice imprisoned and tried for plotting an Irish insurrection against the British authorities in NSW, a highly dubious charge that that he was acquitted of (though he still had to do time in Norfolk Island and Van Diemens Land penal colonies). When the NSW Corps overthrew Governor Bligh in the Rum Rebellion, Dwyer was reinstated as a free man, fortune favoured him again a couple of years later when he was made chief constable of police at Liverpool, NSW, and then it deserted him once more when Dwyer ended up in debtors’ prison (Ruan O’Donnell, ‘Dwyer, Michael (1772–1825)’, Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, https://adb.anu.edu.au/
biography/dwyer-michael-12896/text23301, published first in hardcopy 2005, accessed online 9 September 2021; O’Sullivan, Michael, 1798 Memorial, Waverley Cemetery, Dictionary of Sydney, 2012, http://dictionaryofsydney.org/entry/1798_memorial_waverley_cemetery, viewed 10 Sep 2021).

First steps on a long road to liberty
The inspiration for a surge in Irish nationalism and a sovereign republic free of English domination came from the French and to a lesser extent American revolutions. Ireland had a parliament of its own in Dublin but democratic participation was strictly limited by religious and property entitlements, squeezing out Catholics and Presbyterians and leaving the “Protestant Ascendency” in control of the country. The Society of United Irishmen (SUI), a secular organisation not restricted to Catholics¹,was formed to push for real autonomy for the Irish. Some reforms were forthcoming such as the franchise for non-Protestants but this was not near enough for the more radical elements of SUI.

Wolfe Tone

The SUI leader (Theobald) Wolfe Tone forged links with French republicans aimed at overthrowing English rule, leading to a 1796 invasion of Ireland by a nearly 14,000-strong French army. Unfortunately nature intervened and the invasion fleet ran into storms off the Irish west coast, loss of vessels and lives forced the abandonment of the invasion. The response of the government in Ireland—symbolically known as Dublin Castle—was to crack down heavily on the SUI radicals. The SUI was driven underground in a wave of repression culminating in the imprisonment of many of the organisation’s leaders. Though the Irish republicanism of SUI was a popular sentiment in the country, it didn’t have universal support even on the Catholic side, the Catholic Church strongly opposed what it saw as the ‘atheistic’ United Irishmen (‘The 1798 Rebellion – A Brief Overview’, John Dorney, The Irish Story, 28-Oct-2017, www.theirishstory.com).

Battle of Vinegar Hill

An uncoordinated insurrection
The Irish rising in 1798 was ill-timed and badly organised – most of the SUI leadership was still incarcerated. The insurgents’ planning was strategically inept, the rebellion was intended to be nationwide, but was largely confined to isolated pockets – Wexford, Leinster, Mayo, Antrim and Down. Dublin which should have been central to the revolt played virtually no part in it (Dorney). Historian Thomas Bartlett disputes the commonly held view of the rebellion being a localised affair…he argues that far from being confined to the east coast, the uprising produced “tremors throughout the country” with disturbance occurring in a very large number of counties (Bartlett, Thomas. “Why the History of the 1798 Rebellion Has Yet to Be Written.” Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris an Dá Chultúr15 (2000): 181-90. Accessed September 8, 2021. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30071449). The rebels had some brief, early successes (especially the Battle of Oulart), but superior English troops and weaponry overwhelmed the poorly equiped Irish force inside a month. A subsequent incursion from a small French expeditionary force offered a momentary flicker of hope for the rebel cause but this was quickly snuffed out as the English-led forces took complete charge of the country. Retribution against the rebel leaders was swift and uncompromisingly brutal, most were summarily executed (or in Wolfe Tone’s case took his own life while awaiting execution). Atrocities were committed on both sides. A large number of the insurgents (like Michael Dwyer later on) were transported to the penal colony in New Holland. The failed ‘98 rising left a mixed legacy, intensifying the level of sectarian bitterness in Ireland but also inspiring countless Irish republicans and revolutionaries to continue the struggle for a free Ireland (‘The 1798 Irish Rebellion’, Thomas Bartlett, BBC, 17-Feb-2011, www.bbc.co.uk).

1800 Act of Union

In the wake of the crushing of the rebellion by the Marquis Cornwallis², fundamental political changes were enacted. The Irish Parliament was dissolved and direct British rule imposed by virtue of the 1800 Act of Union with Ireland, a situation that would stay in force until the Irish Free State came into being in 1922.

__________________________________

¹ in fact many of the leaders like Wolfe Tone, Harvey and Keogh were Protestant
² the same (Lord) Cornwallis in the forefront of the ignominy associated with the 1781 English surrender at Yorktown which ended the land conflict in the American War of Independence

A Female Helicopter Trailblazer, the “Whirly Girls” and the Struggle for a Place in the Cockpit: Women in the ‘Contrails’ of Modern Aviation

Posted on by E Curb Nottus
Aviation history, Gender wars, Society & Culture, Travel

When the first men managed through repeated trial-and-error to get manned “flying machines” off the ground, the first women pioneers weren’t that far behind them in getting into the skies. The first woman got her flying licence (Elise Deroche in France) less than nine years after the Wright brothers made their epic 59-second ‘hop’ – see the 2017 brace of articles elsewhere on this blogsite, Equality at 10,000 Feet: The Pioneer Aviatrix in the Golden Age of Aviation – Part I (May 27, 2017) and Part II (May 31, 2017).

Baroness Derouche (Source: This Day in Aviation)
🔺Reitsch testing the FW-61 (Photo: ullstein bild via Getty Images)

While many women overcame obstacles on the way to a career as an aviatrix, those of their sex wanting to become helicopter pilots have found it even more difficult and onerous. The prospects around 1940 when the world’s first modern rotary-wing copter became fully functional looked bright enough for women. Nazi Germany’s pioneering aviatrix Hanna Reitsch was leading the way. In 1938 Reitsch☸ became the first woman to test fly a helicopter, Focke’s FW-61 helicopter, even going on to set a distance record for helicopter flight of 109km. She followed that up with the record (shared  with another pilot) for being the first in the world to fly a copter in an enclosed space❇ (Sophie Jackson, Hitler’s Heroine, Hanna Reitsch (2014)).

🔺 Reitsch’s 1955 autobiography

Unfortunately, as the industry has grown since those formative days, female helicopter pilots trying to follow the trajectory of Reitsch’s stellar achievements in the air have found it much harder to penetrate the masculine preserve of the helicopter world. Today women still lag far behind in the gender stakes, in 2019 according to the Civil Aviation Authority women made up only 4.5% of the helicopter pilots in the UK, with just the single female instructor-examiner for the whole country (“International Women’s Day: ‘I’m teaching other women to fly helicopters’”, BBC, 08-Mar-2019, www.bbc.com).

(Photo: Stephanie Wallace/IMdiversity)

The statistics are hardly more encouraging in the US. The Helicopter Association International puts the number of female pilots at around 5%, the FAA (Federal Aviation Administration) which pointedly has no specific data on women helicopter pilots estimates the figure at a perhaps generous 7.9%. (‘How These 2 Women Became The Helicopter Pilot and Reporter Inside Skyeye’, ABC13, 11-Mar-2021, www.abc13.com). Even more concerning, the percentage of women behind the controls has been stagnant over recent decades✴.

But it’s not from the lack of trying to effect change on the part of women aviators! The barriers to female entry into both the commercial and military fields of helicopters led pilot Jean Ross Howard Phelan (above), the 8th US woman to gain her helicopter accreditation, to form Whirly Girls International in 1955—an association dedicated to the advancement of women in helicopter aviation—with just 12 other charter members🈂. Today the group has 72,000 members from 44 countries.

The minuscule inroads made by women inside the sanctum of the “male cockpit” isn’t confined to rotary-wing aircraft. Women pilots have barely had more success in cracking the fixed-wing aircraft industry, their share of the jobs in the US has hovered somewhere between five and six-and-a-half percent. Despite all the efforts of women’s aviation bodies including the Ninety-Nines (the Whirly Girls’ “older sister” organisation) to make headway in rectifying the imbalance, women today constitute just 7% of the world’s certified pilots for all types of aircraft (‘Female Helicopter Pilots on The Rise’, Claire McCann, Prestige Helicopters, Inc., Upd.11-Nov-2020, www.prestigehelicopters.com).

Women in Aviation International: best strategy, targeting girls at a young age to foster the ‘bug’ for a flying career

The reasons flying has continued to be a male stronghold are many and varied. With so few women pilots—only 13 credentialed to fly helicopters by 1955—young women and girls have been bereft of visible role models and mentors to show the way. At school-level not enough effort have been made to make teenage girls aware of the opportunities there are in a flying career. The preponderance of male pilots perpetuates the “highly masculine image of aviation“, reinforcing the stereotype that the profession is “not a woman’s job” (Why There Aren’t More Female Pilots’, Katherine LaGrave, IMdiversity 08-Mar-2018, www.imdiversity.com). This in part comes back to a prevailing mentality of “Top Gun” chauvinism. Female pilots have commented on aviation still being an “old boys’ club” and the lack of support, bias and intimidation they experienced from men in the industry during their training (‘Chances Are Your Pilot Isn’t a Woman. Here’s Why’, Kimberly Perkins, Seattle Business, (nd), www.seattlebusinessmag.com). The issue of unhelpful male pilots for some women has led to another road block, the paucity of female instructors in the industry. 

🔺 Ret.Col. Sally D Murphy, 1st female copter pilot in US Army

Once in the industry some women pilots have found themselves facing static career paths, the sheer lack of opportunities to attain seniority has eventually led a number of women in military and commercial aviation to prematurely leave the profession. Another criticism of the aviation industry is that it hasn’t embraced the change in work rules and conditions that other industries have…getting the work/life balance right is an issue of more importance to women who usually have to bear the brunt of child-rearing activities (‘Why are there so few women in aviation?’, Kathryn Creedy, CNN, 20-Nov-2019, www.cnn.com).

🔺 Cessna 172

Research suggests the prohibitive costs involved can be a barrier for women. Aircraft training in the US can cost up to US$150,000, add to this the soaring price of purchasing an entry-level commercial plane today…the (adjusted) price of buying a new Cessna 172 is four times greater than it was in 1960 (‘Why Are There So Few Female Pilots?, Rebecca Maksel, Air and Space, 06-Feb-2015, www.airspacemag.com). 

🔺 Malaysia’s 1st female copter pilot (Photo: The Star (Mal.)

What makes the persistence of multiple barriers and obstacles blocking women from realising their professional pilot dreams maddeningly vexatious is the dilemma now facing the industry as a whole, a looming worldwide shortage of qualified pilots to take the reins of the big airliners. Some airlines like United in the US recently have flagged the introduction of quotas to increase pilot numbers for women and for minorities, but much more fundamental structural change is required before we see real progress in tackling the gender imbalance. 

(Photo: PPRuNe Forums)

▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪▬▫▬▪

☸ having already been appointed a flugkapitän (flight captain), a position till then exclusively reserved for male German pilots 

❇ later Reitsch was also the first woman to fly a rocket plane

✴ numbers in the US did initially rise from the 1960s to the 1980s but have plateaued since that point (Maksel)

🈂 member #1 was appropriately enough Hanna Reitsch

City Lights Bookshop: Shakespeare and Company’s “Symbiotic Sister”

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics, Old technology, Popular Culture, Regional History, Social History, Society & Culture

In 1953, two years after George Whitman resurrected Sylvia Beach’s famed Shakespeare and Company in Paris, the bookshop that was to become its trans-Atlantic soul mate, City Lights, opened its doors in the North Beach area of San Francisco🄰.

(Photo: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)

Two landmark ‘indie’ bookshops
The story of Shakespeare and Company’s evolution into an legendary bookshop has been sketched in a previous blog piece: ‘Hanging Out at Shakespeare and Company’, 21-July-2021. On the other side of the Atlantic another distinctive stand-alone bookshop was staking it’s undeniable claim for iconic status in the world of independent booksellers.

A literary community
Lawrence Ferlinghetti envisaged City Lights as “a literary meeting place”—just like Whitman and Shakespeare and Company—a haven for aspiring writers to hangout and find creativity. A poet himself, Ferlinghetti attracted an emerging group of fiction writers and poets that coalesced into the “Best Generation”, including Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder and Gregory Corso. The Beat writers and poets found themselves a comfortable niche hanging out together in the basement reading room of City Lights.

(Image: Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley)

Not only that, Ferlinghetti was proactive in his support for the Beats’ budding careers by starting a publishing arm at City Lights, bringing to the public collections of poetry, offbeat and radical books ignored by the mainstream press. Ferlinghetti’s disavowal of the commercial mainstream saw him promote alternative newspapers and magazines as well (‘Lawrence Ferlinghetti, poet and founder of City Lights bookshop, dies aged 101’, Sian Cain, The Guardian, 23-Feb-2021, www.theguardian.com).

(Image: citylights.com)

Maverick bookseller 
City Lights was always an innovator in the bookselling biz. It arose with the onset of the paperback revolution, a wave that the San Fran bookshop happily rode. Hard covers were expensive so City Lights became the first all-paperback bookshop in the US (co-founder Paul Martin’s idea). The bookstore bucked the bookselling status quo – before City Lights came along readers could only buy paperbacks from drugstores, bus stations and newsstands (‘The Beat Generation in San Francisco’, Bill Morgan, www.citylights.com). Ferlinghetti’s store was a democratising force in US bookselling, City Lights’ paperbacks were cheap, all budgets could afford their quality pocket books. City Lights’ innovativeness extended to opening hours. Unlike the bulk of mainstream American bookshops who usually closed early in the Fifties, City Lights stayed open seven days a week and late into the night.

🔺 the ’emperor of City Lights

Bookshop outreach
The bookshop extended outreach activities to the local community. The store maintained a community bulletin board, disseminating info for the North Beach literary set, thus helping to foster the local counterculture community. Ferlinghetti also furnished the City Lights store with letter racks for itinerants who frequented the triangular storefront to collect their mail.

The ‘Howl’ episode
In 1956 Ferlinghetti published and distributed a poem by an unknown Beat poet Allen Ginsberg. Police in an undercover sting operation confiscated Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’🄱 collection and arrested Ferlinghetti who was charged with selling “obscene material and corrupting America’s youth”. The subsequent trial became a cause celeb in the industry. The judge found that the publication had “redeeming social significance” and therefore was not obscene🄲. The trial publicity was great for Ginsberg’s poetry and for City Lights. ‘Howl’ became an underground best-seller and a symbol of both the counterculture and the Beat Generation🄳 (Morgan).

🔺 Ferlinghetti outside City Lights, 1950s

Political poetics
The character of City Lights reflected Ferlinghetti’s own political and social activism. The “philosophical anarchist” was a bulwark for left causes, eg, using the bookshop venue to host many sit-ins and protests against the Vietnam War (“books, not bombs”). Ferlinghetti believed that poetry was a social force capable of raising the consciousness of the people.

Ferlinghetti & Ginsberg (Source: SFist)
Precarious business model? 
Profitability was not City Lights’ raison d’être. Staying out of “the red” was a constant challenge. To stay afloat sometimes the publishing side needed to bail out the retail sales which was losing money and at other times it was vice versa (Cain). What didn’t help matters financial were the activities of shoplifting gangs in the Seventies which targeted the bookshop. And if it wasn’t them it was insiders like poet Gregory Corso helping himself liberally to the till (Morgan).

Whitman & Ferlinghetti (seated) in 2002 (Photo: Mary Duncan/Paris Writers Press)

Footnote: the extent to which Shakespeare and Co and City Lights can be called sister bookshops comes down largely to the personal visions of their founders Whitman and Ferlinghetti🄴 who were both lifelong book tragics🄵, “(sharing a) love of literature and poetry (and a) devotion and commitment to the power of words” (‘The Beats go on…’, Alix Sharkey, The Guardian, 02-Mar-2002, www.theguardian.com). For Whitman and Ferlinghetti however, the bookshop was more than a receptacle for selling books, it filled the roles of haven and incubator in nurturing new writers as well as a hub for the local literary community. Sister bookstores they may be but they are clearly not identical twins when it comes to the interiors and decors of the two bookshops…City Lights’ book displays are neatly-ordered and arranged whereas Shakespeare and Co is clutter central to the max!

City Lights (Photo: Literary Hub)

Lawrence Monsanto Ferlinghetti, poet, painter, social activist, and co-founder of City Lights. The New York born, Paris educated, bookseller and publisher, died on 22nd February 2021, aged 101.

▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁▁

🄰 City Lights’ address, 261-271 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco 94133, places it technically within Chinatown but the store identifies with the adjoining precinct of North Beach

🄱 ‘Howl’, ‘I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness…’ was a thunderbolt against the conservative poetry establishment of Fifties America, the prototype for a new poetry which immersed itself in “wide-eyed truth-telling”

🄲 the basis of the acquittal was a precedent called on in later attempts to overturn bans on works like Tropic of Capricorn and Naked Lunch

🄳 although often associated with them, City Light’s publishing arm never confined itself to the beat writers, it also publishes the work of non-Beat luminaries like Charles Bukowski, Sam Shepard and Malcolm Lowry

🄴 strictly speaking Ferlinghetti wasn’t the founder of City Lights, that was sociology academic Paul D Martin but Ferlinghetti got into the business on the ground floor in 1953 and took sole charge of the bookshop within two years after Martin left

🄵 Whitman literally slept in a room in the store overflowing with books

Hanging Out at Shakespeare and Company: Modernist Literary Salon and Sanctuary for Aspiring Writers Rolled into one Parisian Bookshop

Posted on by Bonza Rottwheeler
Creative Writing, Literary & Linguistics, Old technology, Society & Culture

(Image: Aprendiz de Viajante)

Beach on the Seine
A must-visit in Paris for the literary and artistic set or even the mildly book-curious is the iconic “Shakespeare and Company” bookstore situated near the Latin Quarter and across from Notre Dame. It’s address is 37 rue de la Bûcherie 75005, V, but it wasn’t always there. Shakespeare & Co founder, American expat Sylvia Beach, started the legendary Left Bank bookshop at 8 rue Dupuytren in 1919. Within three years Beach moved the shop to the 6th Arrondissement at 12 rue de l’Odéan, across the street from La Masion des Amis des Livres owned by Beach’s future ‘bestie’ and amour Adrienne Monnier. This bookshop was the template Beach used for her own serious literature bookshop-cum-lending library.

𐅉 Ulysses – Joyce and Beach at Shakespeare & Co

Beach’s lifeline for Joyce’s untouchable manuscript
Beach is probably best remembered for giving James Joyce his big breakthrough in the literary world, publishing Ulysses in
1922 when nobody else would touch it…the abstruse, controversial novel went on to become a masterpiece of modern literature. Over time Shakespeare and Company acquired a more lasting fame as the hub of Anglo-American literary culture and modernism in Paris. Aspiring British, Irish and American writers, prompted by a post-WWI favourable pound and dollar exchange rate against the French franc, flocked to the creative milieu of Paris where they discovered the unique appeal of Beach’s Anglophone bookshop🄱 (The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce’s Ulysses, Kevin Birmingham, 2014).

𐅉 Hemingway & Fitzgerald (www.pinterest.fr)

“The Lost Generation”
In the interwar years Beach’s bookshop became a haven for the Anglophone literati…habitués included the likes of TS Eliot and Ezra Pound, and the “Lost Generation” of American intellectuals, modernist writers and artists including Ernest Hemingway, F Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein, Djuna Barnes, Ford Maddox Ford, Man Ray, etc. Hemingway and other illustrious names belonged to the store’s lending library, borrowing books when they couldn’t afford to buy them. At the same time French intellectual writers such as Gidé and de Beauvoir also benefitted from Sylvia’s efforts to get their work better known in the US. The bookseller also gave crucial assistance to various avant-garde ‘little magazines’ in getting their publications off the ground by distributing their editions (Shakespeare and Co: The world’s most famous bookshop at 100‘, Cath Pound, BBC, 19-Nov-2019, www.bbc.com).

𐅉 a young George Whitman

Shakespeare and Company redux
In 1941 with occupied Paris under the Nazi swastika, the shop was closed down and Beach interned for a period after Sylvia refused to sell the last copy of Finnegan’s Wake to a German officer. The closure was permanent but the phoenix of Beach’s bookstore did rise again, reinvented by another American expat a decade later. In 1951 WWII veteran George Whitman opened a new, independent English-language bookshop – effectively “Shakespeare and Company Mach II“, though originally called Le Mistral. Later Sylvia Beach apparently anointed Whitman’s bookshop as the true and worthy successor to her original Shakespeare and Company (after Beach’s death in 1962 Whitman renamed the bookshop “Shakespeare and Company”) (‘Bookshop Shakespeare and Company. Paris’, by Els, www.flickr.com).

(Source: another mag.com)

“The Beat Generation”
Within a short time Whitman’s Mistral bookshop was fulfilling the same service to Paris-based Bohemians as Beach’s had for the Lost Generation of writers. Le Mistral, the second coming of “Shakespeare and Co”, became a mecca for a new literary generation in the Fifties, the ’Beat’ Generation and its writers including Allen Ginsberg, William S Burroughs and Greg Corso. Other English-language expats to frequent the bookshop at this time include Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, Lawrence Durrell and Ray Bradbury (‘Shakespeare and a Company (Bookshop), Wikipedia, http://en.m.wikipedia.org).

𐅉 Quote from medieval Persian poet Hafiz of Shiraz

Tumbleweed Hotel‘s quirky tariff
George Whitman maintained Sylvia Beach’s tradition of putting aspiring young writers up for the night (or several nights)…in return for a very basic cot or even a bench, the guests were required to work in the store, read a book and write a one-page autobiography🄲 (‘A Brief History of Shakespeare and Company, Paris’ Legendary Bookstore’, Alex Ledsom, Culture Trip, 26-Feb-2018, www.theculturetrip.com.

𐅉 Sylvia Whitman (Photo: nicethingspalomas.com)

Generation-and-a-half change
George Whitman died in 2011 at 98…the last 10 years of his life was a struggle of wills as the increasingly wildly eccentric George sought to push back against the attempts of his daughter Sylvia Beach Whitman🄳 to modernise the bookshop🄴. Since becoming sole proprietor, Sylvia has moved Shakespeare and Company forward with the times—web-based online transactions, modern accounting practices, the addition of a café, etc—but she still runs a lending library and a second-hand book section, hosts book launches and regular author readings by Zadie Smith, Martin Amis, etc in the shop (‘In a bookstore in Paris’, Bruce Handy, Vanity Fair, 21-Oct-2014, www.vanityfair.com).

(Photo: www.minute.net)

📚 📚 📚

Some takes by visitors on the physical layout of Whitman’s bookshop:

° “a Tardis – modest enough on the outside, a labyrinth on the inside” ~ Jeanette Winterson

° “Shakespeare and Company has the rambling lucidity of an unkempt boudoir” ~ Penny Watson, ‘A tale of two bookshops’ [SMH, Dec 1-2, 2007]

° “a literary octopus with an insatiable appetite for print, taking over the beat-up building … room by room, floor by floor, a veritable nest of books” ~ Lawrence Ferlinghetti

📚 📚 📚

𐅉 Sylvia Beach (Source: ricorso.net)

 

Footnote: for the literary expatriates who frequented Shakespeare and Company, the bookshop served a number of purposes. It functioned as a sort of support network club where the expat writers could meet other members, could draw inspiration from its environs, they could read a wide range of quality literature including books banned in the US and UK, and they could write in its rooms🄵.The bookshop was a “sanctuary for progressive writers and a hub for innovative publishing” (Pound). Some of the expat artists and writers even used Beach’s bookshop as their postal box for receiving mail in Paris (Birmingham).

▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫▪▫

🄰 Joyce ‘repaid’ Beach by later defecting to a new publisher at a time the bookseller was in a financial jam

🄱 Beach couldn’t however replicate the triumph of getting Ulysses into print with DH Lawrence’s controversial Lady Chatterley’s Lover 

🄲 the senior Whitman described these blow-in visitors as ’Tumbleweeds’, estimated to number around 30,000 since 1951

🄳 named in honour of the original Sylvia Beach

🄴 George was resistant to changing even one iota of the seemingly chaotic structure of the shop; he didn’t believe in phones or credit cards or computers (Handy)

🄵 Whitman gave the store’s rooms whimsical names like “Old Smoky Reading Room” and “Blue Oyster Tearoom”