Find number twelve, rue de l'Odéon — Oh-day-on. There's no bookstore here anymore. Just a doorway, apartments, and a plaque you'd walk past in a hurry. In nineteen twenty-two, this address published the most important novel of the twentieth century, because nobody else on Earth had the nerve.
The shop was called Shakespeare and Company, and it belonged to Sylvia Beach, an American preacher's daughter from New Jersey. She opened an English-language bookstore here after the First World War, and it became the clubhouse of the Lost Generation. Hemingway borrowed books he couldn't afford. Fitzgerald turned up. Gertrude Stein held forth. Beach ran a bookshop, a lending library, a post office, and an unofficial bank for broke writers, all from one narrow room.
Then James Joyce walked in with a problem. His novel Ulysses had been declared obscene before it was even finished. An American court had convicted the magazine serializing it. British printers refused to set the type. Virginia Woolf
passed. Every established publisher in the English-speaking world looked at the manuscript of the century and said no thank you.
So Sylvia Beach, a bookshop owner with zero publishing experience, asked Joyce a question she later wrote down. Would you let Shakespeare and Company have the honor of bringing out your Ulysses? He said yes on the spot — which tells you exactly how out of options he was
