I managed to sneak off for a few months from my first degree and go to Paris on a Fellowship to study Sylvia Beach. Beach was an American expat in Paris in the twenties and opened her bookshop, Shakespeare and Company. Without meaning to, she ended up fostering a whole literary movement there, drawing in writers like James Joyce, F Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and was the first to publish Joyce’s Ulysses. When I grow up, I want to be Sylvia Beach.