SYLVIA BEACH’s famous Parisian bookstore, Shakespeare and Company, located in the heart of the French capital’s Left Bank, was a haven for literary luminaries like Ernest Hemingway and F Scott Fitzgerald in the interwar years.
The shop’s demure proprietor had cut her teeth in publishing circles by taking on Joyce’s Ulysses manuscript when no other publisher would touch it.
However, Beach's fortunes were to change dramatically with the fall of the city to German forces in 1940. She was forced to close her shop after allegedly refusing to sell her last copy of Joyce's Finnegans Waketo a German officer.
As an American citizen in Nazi-occupied France, Beach was interned as an enemy alien in 1942. She was imprisoned with 300 other American women at the Jardin d’Acclimatation in the 16th arrondissement.
A campaign by friends and colleagues got her released after six months of incarceration.
Chief among her campaigners was the St Louis millionaire and art collector, Tudor Wilkinson.
At the time, Wilkinson was playing a dangerous game, publicly cultivating high-up contacts in the Vichy administration while secretly aiding the resistance movement.
Before the war, he had received Hermann Goering at his Paris apartment after the Nazi reichsmarschall had requested to see his paintings.
As a token of gratitude for his efforts to have her released, Beach gave Wilkinson a first-edition copy of Ulysses, number 24 of the first 100 published, in the original blue wrapper. It was inscribed: "For Tudor Wilkinson this copy of the 1st edition of James Joyce's Ulyssesas a token of gratitude from Sylvia Beach, Paris, February 1943". The publisher also enclosed a photograph of Joyce, Beach and her sister Cyprion inside her famous bookstore, dating from 1921.
