On her first visit there, Sylvia met Adrienne Monnier, the “stoutish” French woman with beautiful “blue-gray” eyes who owned and operated the shop (Beach 13). Sylvia learned that she could find a particular literary review at La Maison des Amis des Livres, a bookshop on rue de l’Odeon. In 1917, her interest in contemporary French literature called her to Paris, where she would remain for the remainder of her life. They would each return to Paris on numerous occasions, and Sylvia would forever change the city’s already rich literary history. However stimulating Princeton must have been, the family remained drawn to France and often traveled there singly or together. The Beach sisters befriended the presidential children of Woodrow Wilson, Grover Cleveland, and James Garfield, who were members of Pastor Beach’s congregation (Beach 7). Sylvia would later wonder in her memoirs if living on Library Place “influence choice of career in the book business” (Beach 6-7). The family moved back home in 1904 when Sylvester was called to pastor the First Presbyterian Church in Princeton, where he had received both his undergraduate and theological degrees (Beach 3, 6). Although the nature of this work kept Sylvester, his wife Eleanor, and their three teenage daughters primarily around other Americans, the Beaches fell in love with Paris over the course of these three years. In 1901, Reverend Sylvester Woodbridge Beach, the Beach family’s ninth minister, answered a call to spiritually guide Americans on the Left Bank of Paris (Beach 4). Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare & Company, and the Publication of Ulysses I.

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