12 Rue de l'Odéon: Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company
Why is it significant?
Walk slowly up Rue de l'Odéon and stop at number 12, an ordinary shopfront with a plaque beside the door. Notice the pavements under your feet, too: this was one of the very first streets in Paris built with raised sidewalks, in the 1780s, when the theatre at the top was new.
Key Facts
| Place | 12 Rue de l'Odéon: Sylvia Beach's Shakespeare and Company |
|---|---|
| Address | 12 Rue de l'Odéon, 75006 Paris, France |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.85100, 2.33890 |
| Part of Walk | Ink, Coffee and Revolution: A Literary Walk Through Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk slowly up Rue de l'Odéon and stop at number 12, an ordinary shopfront with a plaque beside the door. Notice the pavements under your feet, too: this was one of the very first streets in Paris built with raised sidewalks, in the 1780s, when the theatre at the top was new.
In 1921 a young American from New Jersey, Sylvia Beach, moved her English-language bookshop and lending library here and called it Shakespeare and Company. Opposite, at number 7, her partner Adrienne Monnier ran a French bookshop, so this short street became a bridge between two literatures. Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, Scott Fitzgerald and a young, broke Ernest Hemingway all came through the door. Hemingway later remembered that Sylvia let him borrow books when he could not afford to buy them.
Then came the great gamble. James Joyce's Ulysses had been banned in the United States after excerpts were judged obscene, and no publisher would touch it. So Sylvia Beach, a bookseller with no experience of publishing, published it herself. The first copies arrived on the second of February 1922, Joyce's fortieth birthday, and the novel that changed modern literature was first sold from this shop.
In 1941, during the Occupation, a German officer came in and demanded her last copy of Joyce's Finnegans Wake from the window. She refused. He said he would come back and confiscate everything. Within hours, with the help of friends, she emptied the shop into an upstairs flat and painted over the name. The shop never reopened, and Sylvia spent months interned by the occupiers.
Beach later wrote that, in August 1944, Hemingway drove up this street with a jeep full of soldiers to free it, and went up on the roof hunting snipers. The name lived on: a later bookshop by the river took it up in her honour, but this was where it began. Now walk on to the top of the street and the grand semicircle of houses facing the theatre.