In December 1941, Sylvia Beach permanently closed Shakespeare and Company rather than comply with a German officer's demand for her last copy of Finnegans Wake.
In December 1941, during the Nazi occupation of Paris, Sylvia Beach permanently closed the doors of Shakespeare and Company. According to Beach's own account, a German officer entered the shop and demanded to purchase her personal, last remaining copy of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake displayed in the window. When Beach refused to sell it, the officer threatened to return and confiscate all the shop's goods.
Rather than allow the Nazis to seize her stock and collection, Beach and her friends worked through the night to remove every book, portrait, and piece of furniture from the premises, hiding them in an empty apartment upstairs. She reportedly had the shop's sign painted over so no trace remained. The bookstore never reopened at that location, ending a 22-year run as a cultural landmark of the Left Bank.
Beach herself was later interned for six months in 1942 as an enemy national by German authorities, an ordeal reflecting the dangers faced by Americans and Allied sympathizers under occupation. After her release, she remained largely in hiding in Paris until the Liberation in 1944.
This episode illustrates the extraordinary pressures placed on cultural institutions and their custodians under totalitarian occupation, and Beach's quiet act of defiance in protecting literature and intellectual freedom from confiscation became part of the legendary lore surrounding Shakespeare and Company.