Sylvia Beach Research Articles

Virginia Woolf’s Common Readers in Paris

In this article, we analyze historical, biographical, geolocational, and book distribution data from the Shakespeare and Company Project to understand Virginia Woolf’s readership in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. The lending library cards from Sylvia Beach’s archive reveal the names of Woolf’s readers, and include important information about their reading habits and professional lives. The article uses a mixed-methods approach, combining historical and archival research on individual readers with visualizations of demographic, literary, and geographical data. Datasets from the Shakespeare and Company Project provide unique access to the networks of distribution, circulation, and readership that defined Woolf’s literary presence in Paris. These networks, in turn, resonate with Woolf’s own deep interest in her various readerships and publics.

Missing Data, Speculative Reading

In this article we use an approach we term “speculative reading” to explore gaps in Sylvia Beach’s lending library records and the Shakespeare and Company Project datasets. We recast the problem of missing data as an opportunity and use a combination of time series forecasting, evolutionary models, and recommendation systems to estimate the extent of missing information and speculatively fill in some gaps. We conclude that the datasets include ninety-three percent of membership activity, ninety-six percent of members, and sixty-four percent to seventy-six percent of the books despite only including twenty-six percent of the borrowing activity. We then treat Ernest Hemingway as a test case for speculative reading: based on Hemingway’s known borrowing and all documented borrowing activity, we generate a list of books he might have borrowed during the years his borrowing is not documented; we then verify and interpret our list against the substantial scholarly record of the books he read and owned.

Black Internationalism and Shakespeare and Company

In the interwar period, Paris became home to a network of Black writers and artists from around the world. Using data from the Shakespeare and Company Project, as well as various archival sources, this article reveals connections between this network and Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and lending library. The article begins with the Harlem Renaissance writer and artist Gwendolyn Bennett, arguing that her relationship with Shakespeare and Company illuminates a porousness between the “Lost Generation” and “Paris Noir.” The article then examines how Beach connected writing from Harlem to Black intellectuals in Paris, who were in the process of creating a new anti-colonial articulation of race.

Sylvia Beach’s Final Book

After her retirement as a bookseller, Sylvia Beach continued to promote new books. This article tells the story of one of these books—the last to be recorded on the Shakespeare and Company lending library cards. In 1962, Beach gave a copy of Bryher’s memoir, The Heart to Artemis (1962), to Jean-Dominique Rey, a young French intellectual. The article argues that the gift demonstrates Beach’s efforts to ensure that the accomplishments of her circle of queer women would not be lost to history.

100 years of James Joyce’s women: wife, daughter and friend

ABSTRACT One hundred years after the publication of Ulysses (1922), the novel that would immortalize James Joyce, his ouvre continues to attract readers, intellectuals and artists as much as his private life still fascinates Joyceans, writers and a general public. The present contribution analyses three recent additions to the so-called ‘Joyce industry’, studying a series of fictional texts that feature the allegedly inexhaustible topic of the Irish writer’s complex relationship with women. Annabel Abbs’s The Joyce Girl (2016), Nuala O’Connor’s Nora (2021) and Kerri Maher’s The Paris Bookseller (2022) are the focus of the present contribution, three biofictions of, respectively, Joyce’s daughter, his wife Nora and of Sylvia Beach, the woman who published Ulysses in book form. It is our intention to assess the extent to which these narratives offer a retrieval of three women’s stories, to study them in the context of recent vindications of biofiction as a subgenre that must be distinguished from both biography and historical fiction and, above all, to account for the undeniable interest and even popularity of women related to Joyce among Joycean scholars but also among average readers.

Archives of Rejection

Abstract What can we learn about unpublished literature—and literature as such—by studying rejected literature? Each of the article’s four sections connects an archival document or set of documents to a topic in literary history and theory. In the first, a ledger tracking submissions to Charles Scribner’s Sons in 1882 leads to a discussion about recovery projects. In the second, a century of Houghton Mifflin reader reports leads to a discussion about evaluation. In the third, a novel submitted to Sylvia Beach at Shakespeare and Company in 1930 leads to a discussion about historical counterfactuals. In the fourth, correspondence from the archives of Amiri Baraka and his agent, Ronald Hobbs, from the 1970s leads to a discussion about taste. Together, these sections introduce a resource and exemplify a method: how attention to small, practical decisions can illuminate large, abstract processes.By attending to editorial debates about poetry, we can understand what artistic value meant to specific people in specific contexts—and thus what it might mean in general. Poetry, in other words, promises to illuminate what’s literary about literary history.

Legendary Expatriation of American Women Writers: Salon Coteries in Adventures of the Mind and The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

The expatriate life of American women writers based upon salon coteries in Paris in the early 20th century is probed into in this paper. The expatriate American women writers constructed an impressive female community through artistic salons led by Natalie Clifford Barney and Gertrude Stein as well as cosmopolitan bookshops run by Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier. When post-war despair and cultural bankruptcy prevailed, they found a new approach in a different world, far from their hometown, and thus promoting American-European cultural exchanges, diversifying modernist ecosphere. The influx of expatriate women also benefited gender equality and feminist writing. Salon coteries reflected their quest for emancipation under constraints and nurtured collective creativity. In the modernist hemisphere belonging to them, the expatriate women writers shared new modes of language, and found their own freedom to write, to voice, to live. The innovation of the paper is the detailed study of salon hostesses Barney’s memoir Adventures of the Mind and Stein’s life narrative The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, with the analysis of public sphere theory and life-writing theory to highlight the memory of collaborative salon space—a created gender-equal sphere of women writers, and their self-discovery spirit in the legendary expatriation.

A modernist meeting in Montparnasse: precarity and freedom in Jean Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight and Cora Sandel’s Alberta and Freedom

ABSTRACT When Jean Rhys was living in Paris in the years between 1918 and 1921 it is entirely likely that she at least saw the Norwegian writer Cora Sandel in the Dome café or elsewhere around Montparnasse, at Sylvia Beach's book store, or on the streets that form a character in both writers' Paris novels. Sandel, who was ten years older than Rhys, lived in Montparnasse between 1906 and 1921. Within just a few years of one another these two writers published achingly similar portraits of displaced women living in Paris among various cohorts of other foreigners. In gestures that decenter both the European hegemony that Rhys so resented and what Sandel saw as suffocating Nordic provincialism, both writers present a de-nationalized Paris that affords their characters certain radical freedoms while at the same time grinding them down economically and psychologically. This essay examines the precarity of the freedom that Sandel explores in Alberte og friheten (1931) [Alberta and Freedom] and the glimpses of rebellious freedom expressed in Rhys's portrait of precarity, Good Morning, Midnight (1939), as they mutually illuminate one another.

How to be Modern: The Darantière Press and Anglo-American Writers in France

The collaboration between Sylvia Beach, James Joyce, and the Dijon printer Maurice Darantière that resulted in the first printing of Ulysses in 1922 was commemorated in a 1988 study by the modernist scholar Jean-Michel Rabaté: Maurice Darantière, les années vingt: bibliographie d’imprimeur. The bibliography appended to the investigation of Darantière's publishing history (1900-1928) reveals a remarkable number of volumes of English-language poetry, essays and fiction during this period. Along with French translations of a range of English-language short stories (by Sherwood Anderson or Edgar Allan Poe), Darantière’s catalogue boasts over a dozen English-language volumes, including those by some of the key figures of anglophone literary modernism (Bryher, Robert McAlmon, Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, H.D.). Darantière’s willingness to print books in a language other than French is a tribute not only to the audaciousness of his enterprise but to the network of influence established among Anglo-American writers, publishers and booksellers in France in the first decades of the twentieth century. What can a new examination of the Darantière collection (Bibliothèque municipale, Dijon) bring to light about the mediation of avant-garde Anglo-American writing in France and what Lawrence Rainey has called the “commodification” (44) of modernist print culture? The contribution of Darantière in the dissemination of Anglo-American literary experiment will be measured alongside the expanding role of the printer, from craftsman to vector of the new expatriate writing.

Buyers versus borrowers: a look at the finances of Shakespeare and Company

Abstract Sylvia Beach is known for her ‘imperfect record keeping’ and often indecipherable business accounts (Fitch, N. R. (1985). Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation: A History of Literary Paris in the Twenties and Thirties. New York: Norton, p. 161). That said, data from her lending library cards and logbooks provide key insight into Shakespeare and Company’s cash flow. While this financial information is not always presented in a systematic or exhaustive manner, it can still be used to develop a more nuanced understanding of the inner workings of Beach’s literary enterprise. To that end, in this article, I use the Shakespeare and Company Project data sets to examine the exchange of books in Beach’s bookshop. More specifically, my analysis centers on the details surrounding purchases and borrows of books from the events data set. By limiting the scope of my study to only those records that contain transactional data—whether in the form of membership fees or actual book purchases—I provide a case study of how to approach incomplete data that unearths a new array of networks that were central to the daily operations of Shakespeare and Company. As a result, in contrast with the common focus on solely the most notable lending library members (or members of the Lost Generation in general), this financial approach brings to light invisible networks and underexplored figures whose monetary contributions were essential to keeping Beach’s business afloat.

H.D. & Bryher, An Untold Love Story of Modernism by Susan McCabe

Reviewed by: H.D. & Bryher, An Untold Love Story of Modernism by Susan McCabe Cynthia Hogue H.D. & Bryher, An Untold Love Story of Modernism. Susan McCabe. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021. Pp. 400. $39.95 (hardcover). As Susan McCabe notes at the beginning of her magisterial new biography, H.D. & Bryher, An Untold Love Story of Modernism, modernist poet H.D. (born Hilda Doolittle) and writer and humanitarian Bryher (born Winifred Ellerman) entered a "union" in which each was the other's center. McCabe calls Bryher H.D.'s "main invisible" who made H.D. "visible" (310). Without her, H.D. "might have lost her creative drive," but without H.D., who shielded Bryher from familial pressures to conform to social conventions, Bryher "might have done herself in" (311). As their "curious" story unfolds in McCabe's riveting telling, a love story emerges in terms that have only become available in the twenty-first century. H.D. was bisexual, polysexual, and Bryher nonbinary, transgender, "they." McCabe's point is that they both "consciously defied the category 'woman'" (311). New criticism and scholarship in the burgeoning field of H.D. studies, augmenting the publication of H.D.'s unpublished manuscripts and republication of Bryher's lost works, suggest the timeliness of a biography in which "this untold story reclaims the pair as unseen activists" (5). What distinguishes McCabe's biography is its objective to portray fully the love in this modern "union," so as to make it visible—and understood—in a new light. Many details of the lives of "our couple" (as McCabe tenderly refers to them throughout the book) are familiar. They met after the Great War, after H.D. had almost died giving birth to her daughter, Perdita. Bryher swept her off to Greece to save her, after which they embarked on a future together defined by making art. Bryher's role beyond that of savior and patron, however—was she H.D.'s "companion"? "partner"?—hasn't been named (14). The obvious—their love, that story—has been hiding, like the purloined letter, in plain sight. That fact is McCabe's North Star as she wends [End Page 679] her way through the rich material record of lives lived fully and thoroughly recorded. Their lives were full of the artistic and intellectual luminaries of their day—among them, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Paul Robeson, Sigmund Freud, Gertrude Stein, Sylvia Beach, and Marianne Moore, to name a few. In 1933 and 1934, H.D. was Freud's analysand in Vienna. Seeing another war on the horizon as the Nazis rose to power, Bryher put her wealth to the cause of helping Jewish refugees to flee, including the elderly Freuds and their family. To read details of the considerable trauma and its generational reverberations is harrowing, but McCabe is undaunted in the telling. Her scholarship is impeccably thorough, bringing new material to light. In addition to being a highly regarded scholar of modernist film and poetry, McCabe is a poet. The lyricism of her elegant prose also recommends H.D. & Bryher. To illustrate, I quote a passage describing a walk H.D. took on the eve of her meeting Bryher. In July 1918, both women were in Cornwall. On the continent, the war dragged on. H.D.'s husband, Richard Aldington, having had an affair on furlough, was back on active duty in France. H.D. had come to Cornwall at the invitation of the composer, Cecil Gray, memorably sketched as having "flabby cheeks," "large ears," and "a beaked nose [that] punctuated his face" (66). Although she had no passion for him (and was spending her time translating The Bacchae), she was already pregnant. Here's McCabe's description: Wandering along, H.D. collected cyclamen and violets, climbed rocks, watched gulls, and took the road to St. Ives, with its anemones, gorse, and chamomile, sensing the "sacramental power" of Druid priests who fashioned circular stones like those of Stonehenge. Her stride convinced her she was breaking from a sex-obsessed crowd toward "a cold healing breath" that "enclosed" her "in crystal." … She cultivated her animist gifts while walking, tied to her "every breath," "charged with meaning," the...

Joyce and his Apostles: The Exchange of Capital between Joyce and transition

In the interwar Parisian literary field, transition was among the most influential expatriate magazines, promoting forms of new, avant-garde literature. Its main feature was the serialisation of James Joyce’s Work in Progress, which was to be published as Finnegans Wake in 1939. Joyce and transition had become closely connected to each other through their literary exchange and the representation of Joyce by transition was beneficial to both the author’s and the literary magazine’s success. Simultaneously, Sylvia Beach, the owner of the bookshop Shakespeare and Company, represented a key factor to both of their careers. This paper interprets these exchanges through the Bourdieusian framework of symbolic capital, arguing that their involvement with each other could be regarded as not just an exchange of literary merit, but also of power, as through their positions in the literary field Joyce and transition, with the help of Beach, were able to substantially influence each other’s literary careers and prestige.

Current JJ Checklist (143)

Current JJ Checklist (143) William S. Brockman Our thanks to the contributors to this number of the "Current Checklist": Sabrina Alonso, Massimo Bacigalupo, Robert Baines, Annie Copeland, Sam Frederick, Richard Gerber, Vincent Golden, Rafaël Newman, Lauri Niskanen, Patrick O'Neill, Tim O'Neill, Fritz Senn, Robert Spoo, and Dirk Vanderbeke. The retrospective James Joyce Checklist, hosted since 2008 by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, not only compiles citations from earlier issues of the JJQ but also provides extensive coverage of editions, criticism, and research dating back to Joyce's lifetime. This resource is available at https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/jamesjoycechecklist/. Please send contributions or suggestions to your bibliographer at w.s.brockman@gmail.com. [End Page 505] JJ WORKS A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Croxley Green: Chiltern Publishing, 2022. 268 pp. ISBN 9781912714971. Ulisses. trans. José María Valverde. Barcelona: Debolsillo, 2021. 974 pp. ISBN 9788466359405. [Reissue of Valverde's 1976 Spanish translation.] "Un poema de James Joyce." Milenio (11 February 2022). [Spanish translation by Víctor Manuel Mendiola of CM 36.] SECONDARY SOURCES ABERBACH, David. "How Joyce's Ulysses Bloomed out of Austro-Hungary's Jews." Jewish Chronicle (11 February 2022): 21. AGGARWAL-SCHIFELLITE, Manisha. "How to Read Ulysses? With Gratitude." Harvard Gazette (24 February 2022). ASHRAF, Jinan. "A Portrait of the Researcher as a Young Teacher: James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in the Classroom." English Teachers' Accounts: Essays on the Teacher, the Text and the Indian Classroom. Ed. Nandana Dutta. London: Routledge, 2022. 183-99. ISBN 978-0-367-61056-2. BACIGALUPO, Massimo. "Ulisse. Il gran teatro della vita." Il Secolo XIX (30 January 2022): 44. BĂDULESCU, Dana. "Rushdie's Joyce." Rushdie's Cross-Pollinations. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2022. 21-31. ISBN 978-1-5275-7720-6. (BARLOW. The Celtic Unconscious: Joyce and Scottish Culture. 2017.) [Rev.: Adam James Cuthbert, Northern Scotland 13, i (2022): 81-83.] (BEACH. "Your friend if ever you had one": The Letters of Sylvia Beach to James Joyce. 2021.) [Rev.: "Cartas revelam caos financeiro de James Joyce e percalços de Ulisses, que faz 100 anos," Folha de Sao Paulo (30 January 2022).] BIRMINGHAM, Kevin. "Rocky Path to Publication for 'most dangerous book.'" Harvard Gazette (1 February 2022). [Excerpt from The Most Dangerous Book, 2014.] BOUGUELMOUNA, Ahlam, and Halima Benzoukh. "Analyzing the Lexicosemantic Features in James Joyce's Ulysses." Journal of Faslo el-khitab 11, i (March 2022): 415-26. https://www.asjp.cerist.dz/en/downArticle/81/11/1/186359. BRASIL, Ubiratan. "Prazer e surpresa em Ulysses, romance revolucionário de James Joyce." Estadão Conteúdo (29 January 2022): Variedades. BUTLER, Eoin. "'Ulysses Is about Life, Being Alive and Thinking. Anybody Should Be Able to Enjoy it.'" Irish Independent (29 January 2022): 17-19. CAMPBELL, Hugh. "James Joyce Stands Beside a Greenhouse." Places Journal (March 2022). https://placesjournal.org/article/c-p-curran-photographs-dublin-james-joyce/. [C. P. Curran's 1904 photograph of Joyce.] "Como James Joyce revolucionou o romance moderno com Ulisses, que completa 100 anos." Folha de Sao Paulo (29 January 2022). CONNOR, Steven. "Unknowing." The Madness of Knowledge: On Wisdom, Ignorance and Fantasies of Knowing. London: Reaktion Books, 2019. 238-73. ISBN 978-1-78194-072-9. [Variations on female genitalia in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake.] DEE, Roslyn. "Ripe Time to Capture Sense of Epiphany in Joyce's 'The Dead.'" Irish Independent (13 January 2022): 2. DEIGNAN, Tom. "The Shadow of Gunmen." America 226, v (April 2022): 48-51. [Joyce and Faulkner on contemporary politics.] EMRE, Merve. "Getting to Yes." New Yorker 98, i (14 & 21 February 2022): 68-73. ENRIGHT, Anne. "Dangerous, Voyeuristic, Transgressive, Exciting: Anne Enright on James Joyce's Ulysses at 100." Guardian (29 January 2022): Books 1. ENRIGHT, Anne. "Dubliners." New York Review of Books 69, i (13 January 2022): 24-25. Europe: Revue Littéraire Mensuelle 100, no. 1113-1114 (January-February 2022). [Special issue: Joyce / Ulysse / 1922. Contents: Mathieu Jung, "Ulysse 2022," 3-4; Mario Praz, "Notes sur Ulysse," 5-18; Evgueni Zamiatine, "Implacable et retentissant," 19-20; Giorgio Manganelli, "Tour d'ivoire pour les masses," 21-23...

Shakespeare and Company Project Data Sets

This article describes three data sets from the Shakespeare and Company Project. The data sets provide information about Shakespeare and Company, Sylvia Beach’s bookshop and lending library in interwar Paris. The first data set focuses on the members of the lending library. The second, on the books that circulated in the lending library. The third, on the events—borrows, purchases, subscriptions, renewals, deposits, reimbursements—that connected members and books. Together, the three data sets promise to address and bridge concerns in modernist studies, the digital humanities, and the public humanities. Work on the data sets began in 2014. The first two versions of the data sets were released in 2020 and 2021, respectively. The current version, 1.2, was released in 2022. Over forty people have contributed to the data sets.

Sylvia Beach and women’s scholarly communities under Occupation: The diary of Madeleine Blaess

In 1939 Madeleine Blaess, a languages graduate, left her home in England for Paris to begin doctoral research at the Sorbonne. Unable to escape Paris before the German invasion in spring 1940, she was trapped in France for the duration of the war. The letters she wrote to her parents during the Phoney War, and the diary she began in October 1940 and continued until after the Liberation, are a fascinating account of her life as a postgraduate scholar in wartime. Through these written traces we glimpse women-run social and intellectual communities and businesses to which many women students turned for scholarly and moral support and, occasionally, practical and financial succour. This article draws on Madeleine’s letters and diary to describe and evaluate the importance of these extra-curricular networks in supporting women students during wartime with a particular focus on the bookshop and library Shakespeare and Company, run by Sylvia Beach.

A Postcard from Mr Joyce to Ms Beach: Death and Commemoration at Glasnevin Cemetery in the Age of Ulysses

In July 1920, James Joyce met Sylvia Beach, the American proprietor of Shakespeare and Company in Paris. Beach had never visited Ireland. Joyce gifted her with a postcard featuring a view from the 1890s of Charles Stewart Parnell's grave in Glasnevin Cemetery. This gift, combined with another tourist postcard of the Parnell grave taken circa 1902, clarified the general appearance of the Parnell grave site on 16 June 1904. The Beach card illuminates the political, moral, and cultural content of Dublin postcards. The photographic evidence of regular visitations to the grave of Parnell in the 1890s contrasted with a waning participation in the annual political celebration held each October to honor his memory. This essay reflects on changing attitudes to Joyce in Ireland in the early 1960s, concluding with a consideration of Beach's Irish visits in 1960 and 1962.

Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and Morrill Cody

Abstract This article discusses the life and works of Morrill Cody (1901–1987), a journalist who lived in Paris throughout the 1920s and intimately knew Fitzgerald, Hemingway, and other literary and artistic figures associated with the expatriate modernist movement. Cody should be better known than he is, and this article attempts to elevate his reputation among scholars and Fitzgerald researchers who might not be familiar with his life and works. His 1984 book, The Women of Montparnasse: The Americans in Paris (with Hugh Ford), is a personal but seminal work that concentrates on the women who played leading and important roles in 1920s Paris. Cody later became a cultural diplomat who organized a celebrated exhibit in Paris in 1959 on “The Writers of Paris” that a number of figures from the 1920s attended. Cody’s papers were donated to Amherst College and contain letters from Hemingway to Cody as well as other celebrated figures from the 1920s, such as Sylvia Beach, Djuna Barnes, Kay Boyle, and others.

Sylvia Beach: Hemingway’s Most Impassioned Supporter

Ernest Hemingway arrived in Paris with his first wife, Hadley, in the winter of 1921. Soon after, he befriended several influential expatriate writers and artists including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. However, he did not nurture these relationships; instead he had a knack for destroying them. But there was one friendship that lasted forty years: his relationship with Shakespeare and Company bookshop owner Sylvia Beach. This essay explores why Sylvia Beach was so important to Ernest Hemingway, supporting all of his works, and never judging him when he moved on to another wife. In addition, this examination reveals why Hemingway reciprocated in their relationship— an atypical action for the author from Oak Park, Illinois.

Paris on the Brink: The 1930s Paris of Jean Renoir, Salvador Dalí, Simone de Beauvoir, André Gide, Sylvia Beach, Léon Blum, and Their Friends by Mary McAuliffe

Paris on the Brink: The 1930s Paris of Jean Renoir, Salvador Dalí, Simone de Beauvoir, André Gide, Sylvia Beach, Léon Blum, and Their Friends by Mary McAuliffe

Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry ed. by Lise Jaillant

Reviewed by: Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry ed. by Lise Jaillant Tamara Radak (bio) PUBLISHING MODERNIST FICTION AND POETRY, edited by Lise Jaillant. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. 288 pp. $104.00 cloth and ebook. In 2014, Oldcastle Books published a never-before-seen paperback edition of Joyce's Dubliners.1 Rather than being based on newly discovered archival material, this edition is part of the publisher's "Pulp! The Classics" series, featuring a Reservoir Dog-type cover that shows famous Dubliners such as Brendan Gleeson, Paul Muldoon, and Colin Farrell sporting black suits and wearing sunglasses; the blurb reads "[l]iars, thieves, whores and priests? James Joyce sure knew how to throw a party!" While this edition did not have quite the same lasting impact on Joycean scholarship as other versions of the author's texts (the "Joyce Wars" need hardly be reiterated here), the uniqueness of its setup draws attention to publishing choices such as cover, layout, and typography, as well as to marketing and target audiences, which are often overlooked or marginalized in analyses of modernist literature.2 Indeed, as the editor of this book, Lise Jaillant, notes, "studying publishers has long seemed a distraction from the real business of literary studies" despite the fact that "the paratext is almost as important as the text itself" (1). We readers tend to see novels as finished artifacts, as printed and bound books. Unless we are dealing with texts that self-reflexively foreground their printing process (such as the increasingly intrusive "[s]llt"s in "Aeolus"3) or employ metafiction on a large scale (such as Finnegans Wake4), jolting us out of our willing suspension of disbelief, we tend not to think about a literary text primarily as a material object. [End Page 460] And yet, as Publishing Modernist Fiction and Poetry convincingly shows, a publisher's choices regarding seemingly inconsequential matters such as typography were crucial for establishing and developing a modernist aesthetic in literary publishing. A case in point was the publisher Faber & Faber (known to Joyceans as "Feebler and Fumbler"5). As John Xiros Cooper notes in the chapter "Bringing Modernism to the Market: The Case of Faber & Faber," Geoffrey Faber and the new employees he hired—among them T. S. Eliot—aimed for "a more modern look" that was opposed to the "typographical traditionalis[m]" displayed by the Gwyers, Faber's former partners at Faber & Gwyer (95). As Cooper notes, "Faber wanted to change the culture of the firm. He wanted to experiment with design, presentation and marketing" (94), which was an important step towards a modernist sense of print publishing. Each chapter focuses on one publisher, outlining that firm's marketing strategies and publishing choices, as well as the challenges its staff members were often faced with as a result of their pioneering role.6 While each essay portrays a single press, the individual chapters are interconnected in intriguing ways without creating a sense of redundancy, but rather recreating the new-found sense of connectivity and cosmopolitanism associated with modernism and its time. While enjoying behind-the-scene views of the inner workings of publishing houses, we also learn more about the people behind them. A particularly interesting case in this regard is the American Broadway producer Crosby Gaige, who published fine books and limited editions by contemporary authors. Gaige recognized Joyce's significance for the modernist literary market, yet "admitted that he did not think much of Joyce as a writer" (166). As Jaillant notes, Gaige was a publisher interested in the market value of modernist authors rather than their daring, paradigm-shifting experiments with form (167). In contrast, Joshua Kotin portrays Sylvia Beach as an unwavering pillar of support for Joyce through the years, believing in his vision and persevering with the publication of Ulysses despite adverse circumstances. Kotin's chapter "Shakespeare and Company: Publisher" draws attention to the personal as well as monetary cost that was involved in the process (Beach frequently jeopardized her own financial security—as well as that of Shakespeare and Company—for Joyce), noting that by the end of their collaboration, Beach eventually "felt exploited after years of serving as Joyce's everything" (131). Besides Beach...