Les Annees Vingt. Les ÉCrivans AméRicains A [Sic] Paris Et Leurs Amis, 1920-1930. Beach, Sylvia (Intro.).

First edition, first printing, inscribed by Beach on the front free endpaper, "For Mogens Boisen, Danish translator of 'Ulysses', and an old friend of Sylvia Beach", with her Shakespeare and Company ex libris ink stamp on the front flap. This is the catalogue for an exhibition which ran from 11 March to 25 April 1959, for which Beach effectively provided all of the exhibits. The exhibition was a celebration of the literary coterie of American expats who lived, worked, partied, and passed through Paris in the 1920s. Beach's bookshop, Shakespeare and Company, was the hub and publishing power at the centre of it all, and Beach could count among her friends and patrons James Joyce, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H.D., Man Ray, the Fitzgeralds, Ernest Hemingway, and Djuna Barnes. In her introduction, Beach acknowledges the difficulty of "holding ten years of literary life between four walls". She rejects the moniker "generation perdue": "it seems to me that few generations have so many writers who have found themselves so quickly and so well realized" (our translations). Square octavo. Original white coated wrappers with flaps, spine and front cover lettered in gilt, front cover illustrated with 25 black and white portrait photographs of American writers named in blue. Text in French. 32 pp. of black and white photographic illustrations on coated paper. Two vertical creases to spine, short closed tears at ends of front joint, wrappers faintly toned, extremities rubbed: a near-fine copy.