Palestine

Last time they picked Finnegans Wake, so the joke is thoroughly on them

The over-painting of a fascia board bearing the name Shakespeare and Company, in Paris in 1941, remains a significant moment in the history of bookshops. Two weeks earlier, a German officer had walked in and tried to buy Finnegans Wake. The shop’s creator and owner Sylvia Beach had refused to sell it to him, claiming she had only one copy and it was her own. Two weeks later he returned to inform her that all her goods were about to be confiscated and within a couple of hours every shelf had been emptied. Books, photographs and furniture had all been carried to an upstairs apartment and a house painter had obliterated the shop’s title. The Anglo-American bookshop in the rue de l’Odéon, which had been the rendezvous for famous writers and where early purchasers of Ulysses, published by Beach, sometimes found themselves being served by its author, was no more.

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/oct/12/shakespeare-and-company-paris-review

https://engelsbergideas.com/portraits/sylvia-beach-the-bookseller-who-defied-the-nazis/

Fuck Fascists

I just want to emphasize, this is a badass moment in history, this bookstore was more of a cultural center for artists in Paris than an actual bookstore, the list of vitally important artists and writers of the era who passed through its doors is intimidating, and it barely even sold books as Sylvia Beach (the owner) would basically hand them out to artists because she wanted people to have books. And yet still, Sylvia Beach hated fascists so fucking much that she boxed the entire god damn thing up and put it into storage rather than comply with fascists even a little bit. Be like Sylvia Beach.

....however please sell the fascist a copy of Finnegans Wake though, hell give it to them for free, that is fucking hilarious actually