Robert Spoo

© 2026 Johns Hopkins University Press 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). [1] Beach took pride in giving the same name to her memoir that she...

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]...