SOURCE: Ford, Hugh. “From Princeton to Paris: Sylvia Beach.” In Published in Paris: American and British Writers, Printers, and Publishers in Paris, 1920-1939, pp. 3-33. London, England: Garnstone Press, 1975.

In the following essay, Ford provides a fairly detailed overview of the life of Sylvia Beach, also reflecting on the impact of her bookshop as well as her efforts to help Joyce publish his Ulysses.

I

The story of how the proprietor of an obscure little bookstore in Paris became the publisher of what is widely considered to be the most important novel of this century will probably always provoke a few incredulous gasps, if only because so audacious an undertaking was accomplished by a slight, brisk, quick-tongued American woman whose knowledge of publishing, a business at least as circuitous in France as in America, was practically nil. Her triumph—destined to be indissolubly linked forever with the author's...