“I couldn’t keep a dog and a James Joyce and a bookshop.” — Sylvia Beach

“I couldn’t keep a dog and a James Joyce and a bookshop.” — Sylvia Beach

It’s her birthday today. Sylvia Beach is one of my heroes due to her influential bookshop in Paris (Shakespeare & Co.), and her nurturing of the writers of that time. You know, minor writers like James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, and Gertrude Stein. When nobody would publish Joyce’s Ulysses because it was deemed obscene, far too hot to handle, she decided that Shakespeare & Co. would put the book out (her first foray into publishing – not too shabb…