The Transcontinental Book Trade: Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company and Victoria Ocampo’s Sur Enterprise

No tengo sino libros que leo, marco con lápiz y acaban medio desencuadernados si los frecuento demasiado.

(I only own books that I read, mark with pencil, and that end up with broken spines because I read them so much.)

—Victoria Ocampo, “De la cartilla al libro” (From Notebook to Book) (1959)

In the second volume of her Testimonios, Victoria Ocampo recalls how her friend, Virginia Woolf, insisted that she must “guardar el dinero para la revista [Sur] y los libros” (save money for her journal [Sur] and books).[1] Drawing on her own publishing experience with the Hogarth Press, Woolf acknowledges both the literary importance of Ocampo’s journal as well as the inherent financial strain of maintaining it. The world of publishing involves great risk, but the rewards can be even greater, as Woolf notes: “¿Sabe usted que nosotros vivimos de la Hogarth Press?” (Did you know that we live off of the Hogarth Press?) (Ocampo, Testimonios. Segunda serie, 282). In light of the decades-long run of Ocampo’s Sur enterprise (1931–1970), it is clear that she took Woolf’s advice to heart and invested virtually all of her time and resources into this literary endeavor.[2] But what about the money she spent on books? Which titles piqued her interest, where did she purchase them, and at what cost? While there is a large body of research dedicated to Ocampo’s literary journal, few scholars have considered the ways in which the books that she acquired over the years influenced her editorial decisions and literary interests. In this paper I will look to archival materials to help shed light on Ocampo’s transatlantic literary purchases in the book world. More specifically, I will analyze extant receipts from one of Ocampo’s preferred bookshops, Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, in an effort to reveal her strategic investment in not only books, but also foundational literary circles.

Ocampo’s global reach and nuanced networks placed her in contact with hundreds of writers and artists from nearly every part of the world throughout the twentieth century. As a result, it should come as no surprise that she developed close ties with both Adrienne Monnier and Sylvia Beach, two of Paris’s most iconic booksellers. Monnier founded La Maison des Amis des Livres bookstore and lending library on November 15, 1915.[3] At the time she was one of the few women in France to own and operate her own bookstore, which set her apart from other shops, and also speaks to her continued investment in other female booksellers. Beach traveled to Paris in 1917 from the United States to study contemporary French literature, and shortly after stumbled upon Monnier’s bookstore, where she would meet countless French authors and intellectuals, and also develop a lasting, intimate friendship with its owner. Under Monnier’s auspices, Beach invested her (mother’s) savings into a shop of her own, Shakespeare and Company, which first opened its doors on November 19, 1919, almost four years to the day after Monnier’s establishment of La Maison des Amis des Livres.[4] As Beach recalls, “Adrienne had had four years of experience as a bookseller. She had opened her shop in the midst of a war and, moreover, kept it going. She promised to advise me in my first steps; also to send me lots of customers. The French, as I knew, were very eager to get a hold of our new writers, and it seemed to me that a little American bookshop on the Left Bank would be welcome.”[5] Beach’s invested French clientele, however, were not the only ones eager to acquire the newest English-language writers that lined her bookshelves.

In the winter of 1928 Victoria Ocampo traveled to Paris for the first time in fifteen years.[6] Shortly after her arrival “she went to the rue de l’Odéon to see for herself what [Ricardo] Güiraldes had told her was one the landmarks of Paris, ‘La Maison des Amis des Livres.’”[7] She quickly became friends with not only Adrienne Monnier, but also Sylvia Beach. In fact, “it was Beach who, in 1929, first recommended to Victoria that she read the works of the English novelist and essayist Virginia Woolf, especially a little book published that year entitled A Room of One’s Own” (Meyer, Victoria Ocampo, 102). Ocampo remained in close contact with both Monnier and Beach for the remainder of their lives and provided them with unwavering support. Most notable is her financial assistance during and after the Second World War. She sent money and visas to aid several of her friends in their escape from France—including Gisèle Freund, Roger Caillois, and Denis de Rougemont—and she also helped sponsor “a shipment of clothes, food, and other rationed items to Adrienne Monnier, who would distribute them to writers at ‘La Maison des Amis des Livres’” (Meyer, Victoria Ocampo, 102–103). After the war, Monnier and many of her close friends organized a tribute to Ocampo to express their deepest gratitude and admiration for her friendship. From this brief biographical sketch it is clear that Ocampo, Monnier, and Beach were not just acquaintances, but rather close friends and, furthermore, a crucial hub of international literary exchange.

The Transcontinental Book Trade

In a pre-digital era, printed materials—from books and pamphlets to other ephemera—are one of the primary means of physically sharing ideas, concepts, and narratives across cultures and continents due in large part to their portability.[8] As Sydney Shep notes, “[b]ooks as texts can travel long distances, define different ideological spheres, negotiate new diasporic identities and transform cultures.”[9] While this movement of materials allows for the circulation of new and previously unknown knowledge, it also allows for the mutation of information. For instance, Isabel Hofmeyr contends in her study of Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress that “when books travel, they change shape. They are excised, summarized, abridged, and bowdlerized by the new intellectual formations into which they migrate.”[10] When books cross the Atlantic or travel to new continents, they often withstand an additional type of textual transformation: translation. While many translators strive to produce faithful and accurate versions of original texts, we must acknowledge the fact that any translation will always be a new work. In their effort to make legible texts that will be appropriate for readers with different cultural referents and understandings of the world, translators continually make linguistic decisions that shape, and alter, the original work. Translation is fundamentally an interpretive act, and the only consistently recognizable element that adorns these transformed texts is the original author’s name. In short, new markets determine how to present and use these newly acquired books and, in the process, recontextualize them. A book’s mobility becomes synonymous with its mutability.

On a macro level, this mutability and, therefore, availability of books around the globe alters our understanding of literature by exposing us to new models, traditions, and styles of writing. Consider the case of Beach’s Shakespeare and Company. A bookshop on the Left Bank in France that was owned and operated by an American expatriate and stocked with English-language titles produced primarily in the United States and England. Beach describes her initial process of acquiring these foreign books to start her shop as follows: “Cyprian, who was in the United States just then, sent me the latest American books. I went over to London and brought back two trunks full of English books, mostly poetry . . . On the way to the boat train, I stopped in Cork Street at the little bookshop of the publisher and bookseller Elkin Mathews to order my Yeats, Joyce, and Pound” (Beach, Shakespeare and Company, 18–19).[11] While these books did not undergo any textual modification, they were subject to what B. Venkat Mani calls bibliomigrancy, or the “physical and virtual migration of literature as books from one part of the world to another.”[12] He argues that “this migration of literature as books . . . contributes to the creation of worldwide readership . . . It is through bibliomigrancy that literary works that are identified—coded—as part of a national literature acquire new identities and are recoded as world literature” (Mani, Recording World Literature, 10).[13] Viewed from this perspective, all of the books that line the shelves in Beach’s shop take on new social and literary histories due to their transcontinental move from one context of production and consumption to another. Whether books travel intranationally or internationally, they will encounter distinct markets and, above all, distinct readers. These print materials may also deviate from a region’s established literary traditions and, thus, forever change them. Moreover, the specific books that Beach chose for her bookshop showcase her desire to curate a selection of English and American titles that speaks to her interests in these countries’ literary production for her customers.

Proof of Purchase

Beach’s love of literature and insatiable reading habits initially inspired her to open Shakespeare and Company on the Left Bank, and she never saw her shop as “just a business,” but rather as “the cause of the best literature” (Beach, Shakespeare and Company, xviii). That is to say, she was always eager to share her interests and literary insights with the world, and not necessarily profit from these exchanges. A case in point is her renowned lending library. Since many of the works that Beach recommended were rare and expensive commodities, such as most modernist works that “were luxuries the French and [her] Left Bankers were not able to afford,” Beach would lend her own personal copies of these much-coveted books to interested readers at a fraction of the cost (Beach, Shakespeare and Company, 21).[14] The books that Beach carried were considered “luxuries” for a variety of reasons. First, some titles that she had in stock were deluxe editions, which is the case for James Joyce’s Ulysses.[15] Since these types of books typically were printed on handmade paper, with expensive bindings, and even signed by their authors, they naturally had a higher cost. Second, because Beach imported the majority of her titles from foreign publishers, the cost of most of her books was higher than locally sourced works at other bookshops. Finally, after leaving the gold standard at the start of World War One, the franc had an extremely low value in comparison with other foreign currencies—especially the United States dollar or the British pound—which meant that many basic items, like books, became luxury items for Beach’s Parisian customers. She recalls, therefore, how “[l]ending books . . . was much easier in Paris than selling them” (Beach, Shakespeare and Company, 21). Who, then, was her paying clientele and how do these communities impact our understanding of Beach’s role in promoting cross-cultural literacies? As we shall see, Beach’s literary influence—and paper trail—extends far beyond the Left Bank.

Even though Sylvia Beach was known for her “imperfect record keeping,” her extant papers housed at Princeton University provide an intimate glimpse into this bookseller’s day-to-day activities (Fitch, Sylvia Beach and the Lost Generation, 161). The largest portion of this collection consists of files pertaining to her Shakespeare and Company bookshop, such as card catalogues for her massive lending library, business correspondence, and a series of writers’ manuscripts and publications.[16] This archive also contains personal correspondence, family records, photographs, and Beach’s own writings and translations. Within the one hundred and eighty boxes that make up this collection there are two folders labeled “Ocampo, Victoria.” The first folder contains a photograph of Ocampo that she inscribed as follows: “For Sylvia Beach avec toute ma sympathie—Victoria Ocampo, Paris 1934.”[17] A small stamp on the photograph tells us that the Argentine photographer, Nicolás Schonfeld (“Estudio Schonfeld”), took it, which suggests that Ocampo brought several copies of this image with her to Paris.[18] While Ocampo’s ties to Beach and her bookshop are known, this photographic evidence solidifies their close relationship.

The second folder dedicated to Ocampo in Beach’s papers contains five items: a calling card, an issue of the literary journal Sur, two sales receipts, and a letter from Carlos Maria Reyles to Adrienne Monnier.[19] The calling card is Ocampo’s. It is addressed to Beach and most likely accompanied a gift since the backside, in Beach’s handwriting, reads: “got lovely green scarf from Victoria. Feb. 9 46.” The issue of Sur is number 184, which dates from February 1950. From the table of contents, we learn that Beach contributed an essay about her publication of Joyce’s Ulysses to this specific issue, which explains why she would own a copy of it.[20] Further evidence for this argument about why Beach might own a copy of this specific issue of Sur is supported by the fact that all of the pages of the issue remain unopened, with the exception of those pages that correspond to her essay.

The last three items in this second folder—two receipts and a letter—pertain to book purchases that Ocampo made at Shakespeare and Company between 1934 and 1935 and will be central to the remainder of my analysis. The first receipt dates from November 13, 1934 and lists just one purchase: Joyce’s Exiles for 26 francs.

The second receipt is for a much larger transaction on January 13, 1935, exactly two months after her first purchase. Here we see that Ocampo acquired a total of fourteen books for the hefty sum of 407.50 francs.

Seven of these fourteen titles are either authored by Woolf or prefaced by her (including what appears to be a luxury first edition of her Kew Gardens based on its price), three are by Dorothy Richardson, two relate to the works of Shakespeare, and the two remaining titles are poetic works by Cecil Day-Lewis and William Schwenck Gilbert. The final item in this second folder is a letter, dated March 2, 1936, from Carlos Maria Reyles to Adrienne Monnier that details Ocampo’s payment for the books she purchased from Shakespeare and Company. Reyles mentions an enclosed check of 300 francs, which suggests that Ocampo paid her balance in person or in a previous check.

Having described the general contents of the two Ocampo folders in the Sylvia Beach papers, I will now turn to a more detailed analysis of the two receipts and the specific books that Ocampo purchased at Shakespeare and Company. While the first receipt lists just one work—Joyce’s Exiles—it nonetheless reveals a great deal about Ocampo’s process of selecting titles to translate and circulate within her publishing house. Ocampo purchased Joyce’s Exiles from Beach in November 1934, and this exact work appears in translation with her Editorial Sur in 1937.[21] The fact that this book is the only one present on the earlier of these two extant receipts might indicate that Ocampo first went to Beach’s shop in order to find an exemplary work of modernist literature to bring back to her Argentine readers. Most of the books that Ocampo published with her Editorial Sur not only reflect her own interests, but also demonstrate a profound awareness of global literary trends. Joyce’s Exiles falls into both of these categories. Joyce was already a well-known figure in the literary world, which makes him an ideal choice for translation and circulation in Latin America. Thanks to Beach’s daring decision to publish Ulysses, Joyce skyrocketed to international fame. Joyce himself also spent a great deal of time at Shakespeare and Company—meeting with friends or borrowing the latest books from Beach’s lending library—which confirms his close ties to the shop, its owner, and the (Parisian) literary world at large.

Yet Ocampo’s decision not to purchase Joyce’s monumental work during this particular visit to Shakespeare and Company, but rather his only extant theatrical work, suggests several things. First, it highlights the arduous task of translation, which Ocampo also touches on in the Editorial Sur’s publicity material for its edition of Desterrados (Exiles): “Pero sucede que no hay en la actual literatura universal libro de más difícil acceso que el Ulises, y como por su lenguaje y extensión la faena de traducirlo resulta empresa sobremanera ardua, probablemente pasarán muchos años antes de que pueda intentarse esa total versión” (But it just so happens that there is no book in all of world literature that is more difficult to access than Ulysses, and due to its language and length the task of translating it would be an enormously arduous business, thus it will probably be many years before anyone attempts such a translation in its totality).[22]

The decision to publish Joyce’s Exiles, as opposed to his Ulysses, is, therefore, strategic. It is not only an easier work to translate, but also a much more approachable work for many first-time readers of Joyce in Buenos Aires.[23]

In light of its popularity, one might imagine that securing copyright to publish a foreign-language version of Ulysses could be complicated. However, because Beach owned the rights to publish the work, and also served as Joyce’s literary agent, it would not have been any more difficult for Ocampo to secure the rights to translate and publish Ulysses than it was for her to do so with Exiles.[24] This peculiar situation accentuates one final concern that most likely impacted Ocampo’s decision not to translate and publish Joyce’s Ulysses: its controversial censorship and subsequent piracy issues. As Joseph Brooker notes, “[t]wo things are widely believed about Ulysses: that it is difficult, and that it is obscene.”[25] When the Little Review first published the “Nausicaa” episode of the novel in 1920, which contained an explicit masturbation scene, obscenity charges were leveled against the magazine’s editors. After a guilty verdict was reached in trial, Ulysses was officially banned from publication in the United States. This only increased demand for the novel, and, as a result, led to a number of pirated editions. The most notable of these unauthorized versions of Ulysses was that of “the biggest literary pirate of the 1920s”: Samuel Roth.[26] Viewed together, all of these factors explain Ocampo’s astute decision to bring Joyce’s lesser-known Exiles from the shelves of Shakespeare and Company to her Argentine readers.

As previously mentioned, the majority of the titles on the second receipt bear Woolf’s name, whether as author, prologist, or printer. The purchase of these seven works points to Ocampo’s desire to familiarize herself with as much of Woolf’s work as possible. In fact, Ocampo met Woolf for the first time a few months prior to this large purchase, which sparked their lasting friendship.[27] In the months following this large book purchase we see Ocampo including a variety of articles about Woolf and her writings in the pages of Sur.[28] These contributions take the form of translations of Woolf’s original writings, essays about her contributions to the literary world, and letters from the author herself. For instance, the first chapter of Un cuarto propio (A Room of One’s Own), translated in its entirety by Jorge Luis Borges, appears in the December 1935 issue (#15), and continues in installments until the March 1936 issue (#18).[29] This style of publication recalls nineteenth-century serial publications and speaks to a desire to market Woolf’s work as thoroughly as possible.[30] A similar situation occurs with Virginia Woolf, Orlando y Cía (Virginia Woolf, Orlando and Co.), a lecture that Ocampo gave on July 7, 1937 for the “Amigos del Arte” in Buenos Aires, which is first printed within the pages of Sur in August 1937 and then appears in book format with the Editorial Sur a mere five months later in January 1938.[31] A few other notable publications by or about Woolf that Ocampo pens or translates for Sur are Tres Guineas (Three Guineas) (1941) and Diario de una escritora (A Writer’s Diary) (1954). She also publishes Antonio Marichalar’s translation of “Pasa el tiempo” (“Time Passes”) from Al faro (To the Lighthouse) in Sur before she releases the entire book with Editorial Sur in 1938.[32] Broadly speaking, Ocampo’s Sur enterprise played a crucial role in disseminating key literary works from around the globe that had previously been linguistically and financially inaccessible for many porteño readers.[33] The vast majority of these translations, which were always “autorizadas por los autores” (authorized by the authors), were undertaken by close friends and colleagues of Ocampo, many of whom also served on the firm’s editorial board, including Borges, José Bianco, and Guillermo de Torre. In essence, Ocampo took full advantage of the rapid growth of the publishing industry in Buenos Aires during the 1930s and 1940s and produced and marketed books of global interest, which is especially clear when we consider the fact that the largest portion of her purchase in question from Beach’s Shakespeare and Company perfectly maps onto European literary trends, which, in turn, serve to populate many of the pages of her literary journal and publishing house.[34]

A series of annotations on this second receipt that pertain to Woolf’s Night and Day require a closer look. More specifically, this title has the letters “O. P.” written after it in pencil by either Beach or one of her colleagues, which suggests that this work was out of print and unavailable for purchase. An additional handwritten note at the bottom of the receipt supports this claim: “S. B. [Sylvia Beach] owes V. O. [Victoria Ocampo] for Night & Day 23 f. [francs].”[35] However, a third extant receipt from Beach’s papers confirms that Ocampo not only received a copy of Night and Day, but also that it was supplied to her directly from the Hogarth Press.[36]

This invoice also reveals that Night and Day, along with two other titles authored by Woolf and one prefaced by Woolf, were sold to Ocampo at a discounted rate (30%) since these lower prices (in pounds) correspond to the prices on Beach’s original receipts (in francs). Aside from establishing that Ocampo successfully acquired a copy of the out-of-print Night and Day, this additional receipt further evinces the meaningful relationship between Ocampo and Woolf.

The three titles by Dorothy Richardson (1873–1957) on Ocampo’s second Shakespeare and Company receipt should be analyzed in tandem with those of Woolf. While Richardson’s name is not as well-known as Woolf’s, both writers strongly advocated for the importance of women’s voices and made sizable contributions to modernist literature. In fact, Richardson’s experimental writing style—one of the first to be termed a stream-of-consciousness style—is considered a precursor to Woolf’s, yet she only recently has received the recognition that she deserves for her literary accomplishments.[37] The three works that Ocampo purchased from Beach—Pointed Roofs, Honeycomb, and Backwater—are all part of Richardson’s monumental work, Pilgrimage (1915–1938), which consists of thirteen volumes, or chapters as Richardson called them. Broadly speaking, the work follows the life of its protagonist, Miriam Henderson, over the course of a period of eighteen years. In addition to her pioneering use of a highly modernist style, Richardson also provides readers with an “unauthorized journey through the interior spaces of a female character’s consciousness” coupled with “the novelty of Miriam’s unauthorized journey through the public spaces of a male dominated culture.”[38]

In her reviews of Pilgrimage, Woolf highlights its technical innovations as well as its prominent development of “the psychological sentence of the feminine gender.”[39] She describes this “woman’s sentence” as follows in her review of Revolving Lights, Richardson’s seventh chapter in the work:

It is of a more elastic fibre than the old, capable of stretching to the extreme, of suspending the frailest particles, of enveloping the vaguest shapes. Other writers of the opposite sex have used sentences of this description and stretched them to the extreme. But there is a difference. Miss Richardson has fashioned her sentence consciously, in order that it may descend to the depths and investigate the crannies of Miriam Henderson’s consciousness. It is a woman’s sentence, but only in the sense that it is used to describe a woman’s mind by a writer who is neither proud nor afraid of anything that she may discover in the psychology of her sex. (Woolf, “Romance and the Heart,” 229)

Here we see Woolf homing in on Richardson’s stream-of-consciousness style and the ways in which she enables readers to enter the mind of her protagonist. While Woolf praises Richardson for her style here, her earlier review of The Tunnel, which is the fourth chapter in Pilgrimage, describes this installment as leaving the reader with “a slight sense of disappointment” for all that the author sacrificed in order to achieve her desired interior monologues.[40] In any case, the thematic and stylistic overlaps that Pilgrimage shares with Woolf’s writings point to its influence on her work. These shared literary aspects between Richardson’s work and that of Woolf, coupled with both writers’ strong feminist critiques of society at large, suggest the fact that Beach might have recommended Richardson’s Pilgrimage to Ocampo.[41] Given that Ocampo only purchased the first three chapters in this work, when all but the final two were available in print, further indicates that Beach recommended Richardson’s work to Ocampo, and that it was not necessarily her personal choice, in contrast with virtually all of the other titles that we find on these two extant receipts.

Returning to the second receipt, Ocampo’s purchase of Shakespeare’s Complete Works illustrates her continued investment in seminal English literary traditions. Moreover, her additional acquisition of C. T. Onion’s Shakespeare Glossary, which is known for its explication of the many idioms and colloquial phrases that appeared throughout all of Shakespeare’s works, highlights not only Ocampo’s interest in English literature, but also her dedication to this field as a source of scholarly inquiry. In fact, both of these texts more than likely aided her as she prepared her lecture, “Historia de mi amistad con los libros ingleses” (The History of My Friendship with English Books), for the Exposition of English Books in Buenos Aires in 1940. More specifically, she spends a great deal of time discussing Shakespeare in this lecture yet concludes that “[q]uerer explicarle Shakespeare a alguien es en cierto modo . . . querer explicarle la vida: es menester que la descubra por sí mismo” (trying to explain Shakespeare to someone is in a sense like trying to explain life to someone: it is necessary for her to discover it for herself).[42] Along with this lecture, Ocampo also dedicates an entire double issue of her literary journal Sur to Shakespeare in 1964, in celebration of his four-hundredth birthday.[43] In her opening essay to these special issues, Ocampo reiterates many of her earlier sentiments about the importance of Shakespeare, and also emphasizes that these issues will not necessarily contain “escritos sorprendentes por su erudición” (writings that are surprising for their erudition), but rather “[testimonios argentinos] sobre Shakespeare” ([Argentine testimonies] about Shakespeare).[44] In this way Ocampo not only brings Shakespeare to Argentina, but also makes his work more meaningful for Latin American readers by showcasing how Latin American writers engage with and interpret his works.

The final two items listed on Ocampo’s second receipt from Shakespeare and Company reflect her predilection for English verse. While W. S. Gilbert’s collection of satirical poems, which are illustrated with his own drawings, might be for Ocampo’s leisure reading, C. Day-Lewis’s A Hope for Poetry is a much more serious study on the effects of poetry on economics, specifically his own verses and those of some of his close friends and colleagues, such as T. S. Eliot. Day-Lewis’s work, therefore, might have served as a potential source of research for types of materials to include in upcoming issues of Sur on global literary trends. In fact, several of the issues raised in this work echo many of the poetic themes that run throughout a special issue in Sur on United States literature (1944).[45] Ocampo also included Day-Lewis’s work in her later anthology of Literatura contemporánea (1957), which indicates the lasting impression of his work on her.[46] In short, virtually all of Ocampo’s purchases not only highlight her literary preferences, but also demonstrate the ways in which she might have planned and prepared for issues of Sur or even public lectures and talks that she was slated to give. All of this further emphasizes the fact that the books that Ocampo purchased were acquired to be used, not simply collected.

To confirm that all of the purchased books were, indeed, for Ocampo’s personal use, I crosschecked the list of books from her receipts with her extant library in Buenos Aires, and found that all but four of the titles still line her shelves.

Even though the original receipts do not specify publishers or publication dates, we can compare the list of titles with books in Ocampo’s library and limit the dates of publication by the dates of purchase to get a better sense of the editions that she most likely acquired from her visits to Shakespeare and Company. For instance, we know that the copy of Joyce’s Exiles that Ocampo purchased from Beach must have been an edition that was produced before November 13, 1934. Ocampo’s library contains just one copy of Exiles—the Egoist Press edition from 1921—which, in all likelihood was the exact edition that she acquired from Beach’s Shakespeare and Company.

Broadly speaking, Ocampo would not have purchased these books, or any others at Beach’s shop, without an interest in reading them: “No tengo sino libros que leo, marco con lápiz y acaban medio desencuadernados si los frecuento demasiado” (I only own books that I read, mark with pencil, and that end up with broken spines because I read them so much).[50] While she admits to enjoying, above all “los libros bien impresos, en buen papel, con buenas encuadernaciones” (well-printed books, on good paper, with good bindings), Ocampo also highlights the fact that she has “poquísimos que tengan esas características” (very few with those features) in her collection (Ocampo, “De cartilla al libro,” 135). Above all Ocampo stresses her belief that books are meant to be read and savored for their literary content. These extant sales receipts, therefore, are even more telling. She would not have purchased these works simply to adorn her library shelves and impress dinner guests, but rather to read and learn from them. In a similar vein, her surviving library, which contains over 13,000 books and periodicals, is testament to her profound knowledge of a variety of literatures and, as a result, her keen aptitude for purchasing (and producing) books. The four books that are missing from her extant collection at Villa Ocampo—Virginia Woolf’s Kew Gardens and Dorothy Richardson’s three volumes—speak to one of three things: either she purchased these books as a gift for someone else, she lent them out to a friend or family member, or they were “pilfered from the estate” after her death.[51]

The books that Ocampo purchased from Beach’s Shakespeare and Company emphasize, above all, her interest in modernist (English) literature. In fact, Ocampo spoke fondly of her intimate relationship with English books on several occasions, most notably during the previously mentioned lecture she gave in 1940: “los libros ingleses me habían contado tantas cosas, humildes o importantes, sus páginas me habían revelado tantos secretos, que siempre he entrado en ese país con un paso seguro de sonámbula” (English books have told me so many things, whether modest or important, their pages have revealed so many secrets to me, that I have always entered that country firmly as a sleepwalker) (Ocampo, “Historia de mi amistad con los libros ingleses,” 32–33).[52] It comes as no surprise, therefore, that she purchased a large number of English titles throughout her lifetime. She even recalls that “los primeros libros que hemos leído, yo y mis hermanas, fueron franceses e ingleses” (the first books that we read, my sisters and I, were French and English) (Ocampo, “De cartilla al libro,” 140). Beach’s Shakespeare and Company, therefore, filled with the newest and most coveted English-language books, was like a home away from home for Ocampo and an ideal place to continue her literary education.

Global Book Markets: Translating Literary Exchange

In the early part of the twentieth century, small bookshops, like Beach’s Shakespeare and Company or Monnier’s La Maison des Amis des Livres, “[operated] as the fulcrum between culture and commerce.”[53] They were, in the words of Lawrence Rainey, a “composite social space” in which public and private life coalesced.[54] As a public space, Beach’s shop allowed for browsing and chance encounters with both authors and books. As a private space, her shop was an extension of her own home where literary exchanges were more common than economic transactions. On any given day an unassuming passerby might walk into Shakespeare and Company, brush shoulders with some of the most well-known literary figures of the time—such as James Joyce, T. S. Eliot, or Ernest Hemingway—, and leave with a work of modernist fiction. This uniquely composite space of Beach’s shop has been analyzed most heavily for its impact on literary modernism.[55] However, examining the day-to-day financial records of Shakespeare and Company reveals a series of lesser-studied literary markets and channels of communication between the global south and the global north. In the case of Ocampo, the exchanges that took place in Beach’s bookshop were much more than just economic; they were, above all, intellectual exchanges. From her frequent visits to Shakespeare and Company—as well as La Maison des Amis des Livres—Ocampo became an integral member of a close-knit circle of feminist thinkers, which included not only Sylvia Beach and Adrienne Monnier, but also Virginia Woolf, Simone de Beauvoir, and Gisèle Freund, among others. The many interactions that Ocampo had with these women, which were made possible through her continued financial and intellectual investment in these Parisian bookstores, greatly impacted her writings and editorial endeavors.[56]

Comparing and contrasting the books that Ocampo purchased from Shakespeare and Company with the catalogues for her own publishing house provides us with a unique glimpse into her methods of production. For instance, the Editorial Sur version of Joyce’s Exiles was not simply another Spanish-language translation produced for Latin American readers, it was the “primera y única traducción española autorizada por el autor” (first and only Spanish translation authorized by the author).[57] In a similar vein, Ocampo’s Editorial Sur published four of Woolf’s works, all of which were the “primera y única traducción autorizada por la autora” (first and only [translations] authorized by the author): Un cuarto propio (1936), Orlando (1937), Al faro (1938), and Tres Guineas (1941).[58] In fact, these were the first Spanish-language translations of Woolf’s work in the world, which highlights Ocampo’s monumental efforts in bringing global literary trends to Latin America.

These extant receipts also demonstrate the fact that Ocampo was part of a much larger literary community. While critics frequently cite the ways in which Ocampo aided Beach and Monnier, as well as many other individuals that formed a part of this intellectual Parisian community, there is little written about the ways in which these booksellers impacted Ocampo, specifically in terms of her feminist thought and her publishing ventures. Examining this type of archival material, therefore, points to one of the potential ways that Ocampo selected books to produce and market within her own publishing house. That is to say, as an active participant in Beach’s vibrant network of authors and artists, Ocampo gained vital insight into emerging literary trends and the most promising writers in Europe. She then used this insight to help inform her purchasing decisions, which would impact not only her own bookshelves, but also those of the many readers of Sur throughout Latin America. In a sense, Ocampo handpicked many books from Beach’s catalogues to bring to Argentina and, in the process, provided her porteño reading public with a global literary experience that was unique for its time.

Notes

I would like to thank Mané Lagos and Joshua Kotin for their feedback on earlier drafts of this paper; Martina López and all of the staff at the Centro de Documentación UNESCO Villa Ocampo for their help with Ocampo’s extant personal library; Michael Winship for his input on deciphering invoices; and Stephen Ferguson, Gabriel Swift, and the staff of Princeton University’s Department of Special Collections for their research assistance with the Sylvia Beach papers.