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”

Caedmon to Audible: From Spoken-Word LPs to Audio Book Bonanza

Posted on by funambulator@live.com
Creative Writing, Leisure activities, Literary & Linguistics, Media & Communications, Memorabilia, Old technology, Popular Culture

The “Groundhog Day” existence of coronavirus, with people ‘sentenced’ to indeterminable periods of isolation and lockdown inside four square walls, has been a boon to the pursuit of leisure activities※. Social media platforms have gone “gang-busters” – Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Zoom, and Snapchat and TikTok (for the Gen-Zs) among others. Streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Stan, ditto. In this year like no other, Audible tell us that audio books are more popular than ever – a trend promoted undoubtedly by Audible’s own deft marketing (eg, during Covid-19 they are streaming a selection of children’s stories free to the public). The uptake of Borrow Box loan activity in 2020 underscores this assertion.

Cohen & Roney 1952: taking the 1st steps for audio booksellers (Photo: Lib of Congress Blogs)

Audio books (ABs) in one form or another have been around a long time, arguably the pioneer in the area of spoken-word records was Caedmon Records, the first to hit the mark with a mainstream audience. The Caedmon company evolved out of the initiatives in 1952 of two 22-year-old female college graduates (Barbara Cohen and Marianne Roney) in the US to record a poetry reading by Welsh poet Dylan Thomas. The popularity of the poetry album which included A Child’s Christmas in Wales laid the groundwork for today’s AB industry. The development of technology assisted the progression of “spoken books”… from the first LPs (Long-playing records), emerging in the 1930s, which gave way to tape cassettes in the 1960s and 70s, which in turn lead later still to compact discs [‘Caedmon Records and Audiobooks, (HarperCollins), www.200.hc.com].

My own personal history as a consumer of spoken-word records begins with the aforementioned Caedmon, circa 1977. In the mid-Seventies I had watched several films in a series of commercial releases under the title “American Film Theatre”, film adaptations of a number of well-known plays…the series which utilised Lord Olivier as its promotional face included Galileo (Brecht), Rhinoceros (Ionesco), Luther (Osborne), The Homecoming (Pinter) and The Iceman Cometh (O’Neill).

At the time I came across vinyl 78s of two of the plays-to-films in the series—Butley (Simon Gray) and A Delicate Balance (Edward Albee)—in a tiny spoken-word section of a second-hand record shop. Snapping them up, this marked my first foray into the (at that time) still embryonic world of collecting ABs.

Audio books then were pretty much unknown in retail record departments and shops… major book retailers were yet to cotton on to the potentiality of thus broadening the market for their products, and online goliaths like Amazon were yet to come into existence. I remember that I got my first spoken-word cassette by (pre-online) mail order from the Royal Blind Society in 1978. The RBS had more incentive than anyone else to embrace “talking books”⋓, an innovation which opened up a whole new world of leisure for the visually-impaired. The first (double cassette) AB that I purchased was a BBC recording of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead by Tom Stoppard.

Since that time the audio book industry has exploded with heavyweights like Hachette Audio, HarperCollins, Macmillan, Penguin Random House and Simon and Schuster, all with significant “skin in the game”. Lording over all these competitors is Audible (Amazon), unchallenged as the dominant market leader. Even before the pandemic the global AB market was valued at US$2.67 Bn in 2019 (wwwgrandviewresearchcom/]. The coronavirus is sending that worldwide sales trajectory even higher (US audio unit sales are up 16% dwarfing the book market growth of the industry as a whole (wwwthenewpublishingstandardcom/)).

The success of audio books has been welcomed by the book industry as a positive addition (cf. the advent of Kindle and e-books which raised fears of ‘cannibalisation’ of the main product)⊞. The takeaway from the AB phenomena is that the aural experience is a different one, and that ABs (according to a Deloitte report) tend to attract a younger demographic that is less inclined to read print books [‘A word in your ear…why the rise of audiobooks is a story worth celebrating’, (Alex Preston), The Guardian, 02-Aug-2020, www.theguardian.com].


The versatility of audio books is behind its blossoming into an integral part of the literature landscape for ‘readers’. ABs can be integrated easily into one’s life in all manner of ways that are not confined to a sedentary or stationary state – while exercising, walking, jogging, cycling, in the gym, while cooking, doing housework, driving a car, commuting, etc [‘Audiobooks: The rise and rise of the books you don’t read’, (Clare Thorp), BBC, 06-Jan-2020, www.bbc.com].

For many buyers of audio books a factor in choosing a title is the reader itself. Having “A-list talent” and the “dulcet tones of a familiar voice” as reader certainly can add value to the product✦, but big names only work if they have a genuine connexion with the material (Thorp). Some ABs work better when the author doubles as reader, this particularly applies to memoirs and non-fiction titles. Having this can convey to the listener a more authentic experience of the subject’s journey. For myself, the AB experience that I most enjoyed was John Lithgow’s brilliant reading of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities. Character actor Lithgow brought such an energy to the reading, greatly enhancing the flavour and tone of Wolfe’s biting satire on greed and status in NYC (in marked contrast to the disappointing Tom Hanks movie version), probably my all-time favourite AB.

Another memorable audio book collection I would place high on my AB order of merit are the recordings of Samuel Pepys’ Diaries (readings by Kenneth Branagh and a BBC dramatisation). From both sets of recordings I got a real “living history” insight into Pepys’ thought processes and compromised behaviour—flaws and virtues, so redolent of that of the modern bureaucrat—and of the everyday life of an event-filled London in late Stuart Britain.

One of the reasons I took to audio books is that it offered me a way into critically acclaimed works of fiction that in print form I had found Sphinx-like and impenetrable. Back in the 1970s I made several attempts at reading the 754 abstruse and puzzling pages of Joyce’s Ulysses before raising the white flag in defeat. Ulysses’ emergence in the AB format in the, must be late Eighties/early Nineties (albeit in an abridged four-CD form) was the key I needed to unlock the stylistic labyrinth of Joyce’s prose. ABs also let me get a handle on that other Irish author of literary complexity Flann O’Brien, and his convoluted metafiction maze The Third Policeman.

FN: Cædmon
Caedmon, the name chosen by Cohen and Roney for their revolutionary business enterprise, was the name of the first known English poet (flourished late Seventh century AD), a Northumbrian cowherd turned exponent of Old English (Anglo-Saxon) verse poetry.

——————-——————-——————-—————

※ another pastime, gaining impetus in the lockdown and perhaps capturing the zeitgeist of 2020 is doomscrolling – the social media practice of continuing to read long streams of news feeds which are disheartening in content

⋓ the term as I recall more in currency at the time than audio books

⊞ print books managed to repulse the challenge from e-books in part due to pricing strategies which disincentivised e-book purchasing [Amazon’s Audiobook Boom’, (Alex Shepard), The New Republic, O3-Jul-2018, www.newrepublic.com]

✦ the rise of ABs has provided a source of peripheral work for some actors, a very welcome and in some cases lucrative sideline