Eleanor Beach, 56, is on her annual visit to see her daughters—she calls them her “chicks”—who live in Europe.
The youngest, Sylvia, 33, owns an English-language bookshop and lending library in Paris on the rue Dupuytren, Shakespeare and Co., which seems to be going well. It hasn’t even been open a year and she already has 103 subscribers to the lending library, most of whom are pretty active borrowers.
But Mom wants to help out. So she and her daughter go on a shopping spree and come back with some decent clothes, a kitchen table, and some more books for the shop.
Sylvia writes to her sister, Holly, 35, in Florence, Italy,
PLM [Poor Little Mother] is flourishing.”
Sylvia’s good friend, Adrienne Monnier, 27, who owns a French-language bookshop a few blocks away, La Maison des Amis des Livres (The House of the Friends of Books), has been a big help in Sylvia’s first year in business.
Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach
Shakespeare & Co. recently had good write-ups in the respected trade journal Publisher’s Weekly and other English-language publications distributed in France. As a result, Sylvia is having a hard time responding to all the letters she is receiving. Many American students write asking for jobs. Sylvia is feeling more like a secretary, rather than an entrepreneur.
“Such Friends”: 100 Years Ago… is the basis for the book, “Such Friends”: The Literary 1920s, to be published by K. Donnelly Communications. For more information, email me at kaydee@gpysyteacher.com.
In 2020 I will be talking about writers’ salons in Ireland, England, France and America before and after the Great War in the University of Pittsburgh Osher Lifelong Learning program.
Manager as Muse, about Scribner’s editor Maxwell Perkins and his relationships with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway and Thomas Wolfe, is available on Amazon in both print and Kindle versions.
If you want to walk with me through Bloomsbury, you can download my audio walking tour, “Such Friends”: Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Group.
SuchFriends Blog 