Chasing Sylvia Beach by Cynthia Morris

Author:Cynthia Morris [Morris, Cynthia]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3
Tags: literary, historical, Sylvia Beach, Paris, booksellers, Hemingway
Publisher: Original Impulse Inc
Published: 2012-06-10T19:00:00+00:00

THE NEXT DAY, Sylvia put Lily to work at the shipping desk, showing her the labels, packing string, and paper. A stack of books sat nearby, ready to be packaged. Lily perched on the stool at the tiny table, feeling like a third grader prepared for an arts and crafts project. She picked up the first book, a heavy tome. Turning it over, she read the title on the spine—Moby Dick. She pulled a sheet of manila paper off the rack and wrapped the book. Writing out the label, she wondered about a person who would willingly read this monster of a book. She had never forgotten the shame of being caught cheating on the Moby Dick quiz in her honors class. It marred her grade and squelched her confidence.

As she wrapped the next book, she eavesdropped on Sylvia discussing printing fliers for the Exposition. Lily slipped back into her own memories, lulled into a daze by Sylvia’s steady murmur. At Capitol Books, orders could be placed online. Lily communicated with people all around the world, finding the books they wanted and shipping them off. The store survived because of this service, where other secondhand bookstores had closed. The additional work from the Internet was almost more rewarding than the regular customers who frequented the store.

She unscrewed the cap on the glue pot, a squat bottle with a fancy blue label. The bristles of the brush, viscous with glue, were splayed in several directions. Oh, the joy of self-adhesive labels, self-adhesive stamps, and all the other little conveniences that made life easy. Sylvia again picked up the phone, her finger in the holes of the dial, circling again and again. Lily thought of caller ID, touch-tone phones, cell phones, and all the gadgets that saved time and money. Things moved much more slowly here and held their value. The postage scale seemed antique, as if Sylvia had been using it for decades. In Lily’s era, if something stopped working, it was thrown out and replaced immediately. Here, you could spend a week’s wages on a dinner in a restaurant. It was all so absurd, compared with the difficulties of the Depression and coming war. Lily wanted her easy life back home as much as she had wanted to inhabit Sylvia’s Paris. Sighing, she set the book on the copper balance, adding a few small weights to the other side. Thinking about the conveniences of home wasn’t helping, so she concentrated on calculating the postage. Sylvia was talking about the magazines she would feature in her booth at the Expo. She needed extra copies of Life and Letters Today from England. It didn’t sound like things were going well; her brusque voice rose as the conversation went on, something about having to pay for extra shipping.

When she had wrapped the final book, Lily announced that she was done. Sylvia mumbled “Uh-huh” but did not turn around. She was bent over the desk, writing. Lily stood and stretched. After a few minutes, Sylvia spoke without looking up.

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