Krista Halverson on the Shakespeare & Company bookshop in Paris
Series: Biblio File in France
Krista Halverson is director of the newly founded\xa0Shakespeare & Company publishing house\xa0and editor of the first-ever history of the bookstore,\xa0Shakespeare & Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart. Previously, she was the managing editor of\xa0Zoetrope: All-Story, a magazine of fiction and art, published by Francis Coppola and headquartered in San Francisco.
I met with Krista at the bookstore to talk about the history of Shakespeare & Company; Sylvia Beach, French bookseller\xa0Adrienne Monnier and the spark between them; anglophone ex-pats in Paris, Hemingway, of course, George Whitman, great talent, James Joyce, Ulysses, and Windsor, Ontario; Shakespeare & Company's openness, the scrapbook effect, the book's designer Loran Stosskopf, the Shakespeare & Company cafe, Tumbleweeds, hopeful youth, and the bookstore's new publishing program.\xa0
1. The Little Review was\xa0founded by\xa0Margaret Anderson\xa0and\xa0published between 1914 to 1929.\xa0With the help of\xa0Jane Heap\xa0and\xa0Ezra Pound, Anderson published\xa0modernist and other early examples of experimental writing and art in the magazine. It is best known for running a\xa0serialization\xa0of\xa0James Joyce\u2019s\xa0Ulysses\xa0and being sued in 1921 for doing so.\xa0Anderson and Heap went to trial over\xa0Ulysses's obscene content. Lawyer and patron of modernist art\xa0John Quinn\xa0defended them at the trial, and lost. The editors each had to pay a fifty-dollar fine.
2. Looks like Proust sealed off the windows in his cork-lined room