Wednesday, May 19, 2010

Honoring Sylvia Beach

The graph below is from Shelf Awareness. I have always wanted to visit Shakespeare and Company, and figure that is one of the main reasons I'd ever want to visit Paris.

Sylvia Beach's Legacy: Communicating 'Vitality of the Book'


"For anyone who loves books, and who mourns the loss of so many
independent bookshops, and must now mourn the loss of the book itself
and wonder at its ghostly reincarnation as an electronically disembodied
text, the Sylvia Beach legacy has hope in it.... To be in Shakespeare
and Company at any time is to remember how wonderful books are,
especially piled in their thousands. But not in the chilly corporate way
of chainstore retail: rather as a noisy conversation, books, readers and
writers talking to each other, which is what happens tenfold at festival
time, a chaotic, exuberant celebration of the written word and its
power.... The best news is that a bookstore that helped to shape the
20th-century world of ideas and exchange has moved vigorously into the
21st century, communicating to a new generation the vitality of the
book."
--Jeanette Winterson in her Times of London
http://news.shelf-awareness.com/ct.jsp?uz3642037Biz9575992
review of a new edition
of The Letters of Sylvia Beach (Columbia University Press).
Beach founded the legendary Shakespeare and Company
http://news.shelf-awareness.com/ct.jsp?uz3642037Biz9575993 bookshop in Paris.

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