The first combined English language bookshop and lending library in Paris, it provided unprecedented access to Anglo-American literature for a cash-strapped post-war population who had little money to buy books. What are the best first lines in fiction? Together with Monnier, her lifelong personal and professional partner whose own store, La Maison des Amis des Livres, was a meeting place for the leading men of French letters, Beach would befriend and nurture two generations of American, Anglo-Irish and French writers including André Gide, Paul Valéry, TS Eliot, Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway and, of course, James Joyce. “My loves were Adrienne Monnier and James Joyce and Shakespeare and Company,” wrote Sylvia Beach, whose legendary Parisian bookstore first opened its doors 100 years ago this month.
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