In today’s episode, we’re discussing The Paris Bookseller, Kerri Maher’s captivating historical novel about Sylvia Beach, Shakespeare and Company, and literary life in 1920s Paris. Beach’s English-language bookshop became a gathering place for expat writers like Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ezra Pound—and published one of the most important (and most banned) books of the 20th century: James Joyce’s Ulysses. We’ll talk about what the novel gets right, where literary fiction meets bookshop reality, and how day-to-day shop life—then and now—is often less glamorously wine-soaked and more physically exhausting than one might wish.
Brattlecast #181 - 30,000 Books!
Today we’re talking about one of the shop’s biggest recent book buys: about 30,000 volumes from Albany, New York. Motivated by a fear of missing out, we made the long trip and were rewarded by a house (including the kitchen cabinets) packed with vintage pulp paperbacks, art books, comics, and even some racier adult material. When you move so many books there are a lot of logistics—ten 6:00am drives, hundreds of flights of stairs, snow management, and boxes stacked to the ceiling of the Brattle’s capacious basement—but we’re happy to bring this especially fun collection to our customers. Pop by and browse it for yourself if you plan to be in Boston any time over the next few years.
Brattlecast #20 - "Majestic Beauty All Unmarred"
Any book that could capture the majesty of our first national park would have to be measured in inches, not feet. Check out some photos of the amazing Hayden landscapes on our social media pages, @brattlebookshop!
