Bookstore biography

Second take

I am delighted that you can now write the story of a bookstore in the same way you can write the story of an individual. It’s an interesting little development in the books about books subgenre — you can call it ‘the bookstore biography’. Don’t think of the Helene Hanff correspondence — that wouldn’t be the thing.

The kind of bookstore biography I’m thinking of gets into the nuts and bolts of how a bookshop is run; the story from the inside out. And 84 Charing Cross Road, while many things, is not quite that.

My first bookstore biography was a gift from a friend several years ago, who knew of my interest in these things and surprised me with a book that told the story of a bookshop and its bookseller. It was called Seven Story Books. The book itself wasn’t the best in the genre, but it got me looking for other bookshop biographies.

The earliest titles I encountered were The King’s English and The Yellow Lighted Bookshop. The King’s English is actually the name of an independent bookshop, and the biography, written by its owner, is an account of the everyday working of a small bookshop.

The Yellow Lighted Bookshop is a more personal account, though less satisfying. But its jacket cover is gorgeous and worth the price of the book. My favourite bookstore biography remains Shakespeare and Company by Sylvia Beach. Beach (1887-1962), who founded this famous bookshop in Paris, is known as the patron saint of independent bookshops.

Reading and re-reading her bookstore biography always gives rise in me the hope that the independent bookstore can once again step in and claim a place for itself as a space where devoted readers and writers gather; the kind of invigorating literary space Beach’s legendary Paris bookstore once was for generations of bibliophiles from all over the world.


She uses the biography not only to make a record of the bookshop, but to also recount the bespoke tales that sprang from there, including how she came to befriend James Joyce, publish Ulysses when no one else would, and the long battle she fought against its ban. The book proves a worthy addition to the saga of a great bookstore, and Beach an even greater bookseller. What engaged me especially were the parts that spoke of her struggle to keep her bookshop afloat. Bibliophiles have a romanticised view of a bookstore, but she is always correcting that with the real business of running a bookshop.

She writes: “A bookshop is mostly tiresome details all day long, and you have to have a passion for it… to grub and grub in it. I have always loved books and their authors, and for the sake of them swallowed the rest of it, but you can’t expect everyone to do the same.”

Beach fled America as a young woman and came to Paris seeking adventure. She noticed books in Europe were cheaper than in the US, and with money partly borrowed from her mother, began Shakespeare and Company in 1919 on Paris’s famous Left Bank — at that time it was only an abandoned laundry on Rue Dupuytren. She was 32.

While setting up shop, she met an already established and well known Paris bookseller, Adrienne Monnier, owner of the literary bookstore ‘La Maison des Amis des Livres’. They fell in love and became partners. In 1921, Beach moved ‘Shakespeare’ closer to Monnier’s bookshop on 12 rue de l’Odéon, and there it stayed until Beach was forced to close it down (the Depression followed by WWII) in 1941.

It was in its second location that the bookstore was patronised hugely by tourists and expatriates (she would allow customers to browse, without putting any pressure on them to buy, and many hung around to just talk literature with her), while the bookshop slowly turned into a sanctuary for struggling writers. She lent them books as if it were a circulating library. Ernest Hemingway, a struggling writer, stopped by often and borrowed books. He wrote in A Movable Feast that she had “pretty legs and she was kind, cheerful and interested, and loved to make jokes and gossip… No one that I ever knew was nicer to me.”

Her bookshop brought together the great modernists: Andre Gide, Scott Fitzgerald, Samuel Beckett, Paul Valery, Ezra Pound, T S Eliot and Gertrude Stein — to name only a few of the star writers who looked to Shakespeare and Company for inspiration, fellowship, ideas, and community. Sad then how Joyce’s unreasonable demands on her brought about the end of their friendship, and with it, her retreat from being a centre point of this literary movement.

Apparently, Joyce schemed money out of her. As his demands increased, she wrote in despair: “I am afraid I and my little shop will not be able to stand the struggle to keep you and your family going from now till June.” Finally, in 1930, she relinquished being Ulysses’s publisher.

Eventually, the bookshop closed and remained shuttered for many years. Another expatriate, George Whitman, bought it over from her in the 1950s, and decided that in addition to being a struggling bookstore, he would also run it as a free hostel for struggling writers.

(There’s a wonderful account of this second incarnation of Shakespeare and Co in Jeremy Mercer’s memoir, Time was Soft There). Soulful and fearless booksellers like Whitman and Sylvia Beach, and now, Whitman’s daughter (the present owner of the bookstore), are a rare breed these days, and we can only hope their courage and passion and vision will inspire other booksellers to keep our independent bookshop open. We are grateful to them for this and respect their struggle.