Sylvia Beach & Company

Slyvia Beach Sylvia Beach, 1927 (March 14, 1887 – October 5, 1962)
Portrait by Berenice Abbott

Sylvia Whitman, owner of Shakespeare & Company, talks about the founder of the original store, Sylvia Beach.

Sylvia and Joyce 1sylviajoyce

Standing in front of her bookstore.

Sylvia Beach and James Joyce (New Yorker)

As we learned by listening to and watching Sylvia in her bookshop, to accomplish her publishing feat she became Joyce’s secretary, editor, impresario, and banker, and had to hire outsiders to run her shop. She organized international and local subscription lists for the book to help finance its printing. After typesetting had begun at Dijon, in a kind of postscript ecstasy of creation, Joyce scribbled some ninety thousand words more on the costly, repeatedly reset proofs, making a four-hundred-thousand word volume, of which Sylvia managed to have two copies printed for his birthday on February 2, 1922—one for him, one for her. (Janet Flanner)

What is it with March 14 birthdays?

EinsteinPict0410
Albert Einstein (photo by Fung Lin Hall from the supermarket rack).

  • Diane Arbus diane-arbus

    Like Simone Weil whose brother was a famous mathematician, Diane’s brother was Howard Nemerov, a respected poet, unlike Simone Weil, Diane’s parents were strange and cold. Maybe to esacpe them Diane married early to Allan Arbus and had two daughters.
    Many interesting links here -(Upgraded Arbus archive with her brother’s eulogy)

    Ferdinand Hodler, Adolph Gottlieb and Telemann were all born on March 14.

    Johann Strauss was born on March 14 – skating to Berezhnaya & Sikharulidze 2000 SP Radzetsky March

    Pi trivia
    Steven Schwartz favorite place is here.
    Google logo today – it’s pi day.
    piday10-hp

  • Lastly something cool and new from Ramiro My Name in Future.