Krista Halverson on the Shakespeare & Company bookshop in Paris

Series: Biblio File in France

Krista Halverson is director of the newly founded Shakespeare & Company publishing house and editor of the first-ever history of the bookstore, Shakespeare & Company, Paris: A History of the Rag & Bone Shop of the Heart. Previously, she was the managing editor of Zoetrope: 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 Adrienne 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. 

1. The Little Review was founded by Margaret Anderson and published between 1914 to 1929. With the help of Jane Heap and Ezra Pound, Anderson published modernist and other early examples of experimental writing and art in the magazine. It is best known for running a serialization of James Joyce’s Ulysses and being sued in 1921 for doing so. Anderson and Heap went to trial over Ulysses's obscene content. Lawyer and patron of modernist art John Quinn defended 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