Robert Spoo

Sylvia Beach was a woman of property. Her “passion projects,” as Melanie Micir calls the rich variety of “queer feminist modernist practice[s]” that Beach and other creative women engaged in, included the founding of her Paris bookshop and lending library; her role as publisher, seller, and distributor of James Joyce’s Ulysses; and the writing of her memoir, Shakespeare and Company (1959). Beach took pride in giving the same name to her memoir that she had given to her bookshop. It was the pride of a property owner, but not one who sought to appropriate all things to herself; her phrase “and Company” signified hospitality: the variety of offerings on her bookshelves, the welcome traffic of writers and readers that flowed through her self-created space on the rue de l’Odéon, and the history of modernism as it took shape within that space. The spaces and places that Beach created were generous and collaborative, but they were also her creations, or largely so, and she was proud of her pioneering spirit and self-reliance. Property is not things, or merely things. In a basic sense, of course, Beach’s bookshop was leased real property; the books she acquired for stocking her shelves were tangible personal property; her memoir, no less than Ulysses, was a form of intellectual property. But these corporeal and incorporeal assets were only starting points for the relational webs that constitute property in its analytic sense: “the legal interest (or aggregate of legal relations) appertaining to such physical [or intangible] object[s].” A thing is property because its owner has a right to prevent others from taking or using it; those others have a duty to refrain from such taking or using. An owner may grant non-owners a privilege to use the property, whereupon, for the duration of the privilege, the owner will have no right to prevent the use. Property is thus a set of correlative positions that are adjustable and interchangeable; the more complex the property interest is, the more complicated are the relations that aggregate around it. Far from being a static binary of meum and tuum, property is inherently utilitarian and social, a vehicle for mediating and regulating peoples’ conflicting desires to own, to access, to use, and to exclude.

This blog post is about an institution of modernism that is quite different from the ones that Lawrence Rainey examined in his groundbreaking book, Institutions of Modernism: Literary Elites and Public Culture. His subjects were patronage, collecting, speculation, investment, little magazines, and deluxe editions—institutions that marked modernism’s “tactical retreat” into a “counter-space securing a momentary respite from a public realm increasingly degraded [by mass media and market values]...