Itinerantdaughter's Blog

I really wanted to post something original––I have an okay original essay that I shopped around a bit and might slap up here––but when I came across this anecdote about Sylvia Beach, doyenne of the original Shakespeare & Co., my most special home, I just couldn’t resist sharing it.  Background: this take place during the Nazi occupation of Paris, obvs.

“My German customers were always rare, but of course after I was classified as ‘the enemy,’ they stopped coming altogether––until a last outstanding visit ended the series.  A high-ranking German officer, who had got out of a huge gray military car, stopped to look at a copy of Finnegans Wake.  Then he came in and, speaking perfect English, said he would buy it.  ‘It’s not for sale.’  ‘Why not?’  My last copy, I explained.  I was keeping it.  For whom?  For myself.  He was angry.  He was so interested in Joyce’s work, he said.  Still I was firm.  Out he strode, and I removed Finnegans Wake from the window and put it safely away.

“A fortnight later, the same officer strode into the bookshop.  Where was Finnegans Wake?  I had put it away.  Fairly trembling with rage, he said, ‘We’re coming to confiscate all your goods today.’  ‘All right.’  He drove off.

“I consulted my concierge.  She opened an unoccupied apartment on the third floor.  (My own apartment was on the second floor.)  My friends and I carried all the books and all the photographs upstairs, mostly in clothesbaskets; and all the furniture.  We even removed the electric-light fixtures.  I had a carpenter take down the shelves.  Within two hours, not a single thing was to be seen in the shop, and a house painter had painted out the name, Shakespeare and Company, on the front of 12 rue de l’Odeon.  The date was 1941.  Did the Germans come to confiscate Shakespeare and Company’s goods?  If so, they  never found the shop.

“Eventually, they did come to fetch the proprietor of Shakespeare and Company.”

“I also had the benefit of being given completely free rein to wander into any office, basement, attic or storeroom at Chestnut Lodge over a five-year period and read whatever I found there.  Because the Lodge’s archives were being created during precisely these years, I was allowed the pleasure of reading each manuscript, listening to each tape, and studying each photograph within a few months of its discovery.  This is every biographer’s dream: being handed the keys to a room filled with treasures and told simply to turn out the lights at the end of the evening.  (Since I was on the grounds of a still-vibrant mental hospital, I was also told that if I wanted lunch or dinner in the cafeteria as a break from working, I should simply sign myself in under ‘guests.’)  Researchers who must rely on archives constructed according to someone else’s plan have to spend a lot more time searching for what they need than I did.”

~ From Gail Hornstein’s (excellent) biography of Frieda Fromm-Reichmann, To Redeem One Person Is to Redeem the World

Please let me read the audiobook version of To Kill a Mockingbird!

To Kill a Mockingbird will finally be available as an e-book and digital audiobook this summer after self-described “old-fashioned” author Harper Lee signed off on allowing the Pulitzer Prize-winning classic to enter the digital age.

In a statement released through her publisher HarperCollins, Lee, who turned 88 on Monday said:

“I’m still old-fashioned. I love dusty old books and libraries. I am amazed and humbled that ‘Mockingbird’ has survived this long. This is ‘Mockingbird’ for a new generation.”

The digital copies will be available for download on July 8. The e-book will be “enhanced” and will include additional material, although a spokesperson from HarperCollins said the extra features had not yet been determined.

(via––sigh––Jezebel)

Update: Sissy Spacek is reading it.  I guess that’s an okay choice.