If Sylvia Beach Blogged

I was talking with a friend the other day about blogging. She asked, What would Sylvia Beach blog?

I laughed. Then I thought about it. Even though I have studied Sylvia for a long time – 15 years, holy cow! – I can’t comfortably say I know exactly what she would think, say or do in any given situation.
But it is fun to imagine, isn’t it? And that’s what I had to do to make a historical figure a character in my novel, Chasing Sylvia Beach.
So let’s play and imagine what Sylvia would blog about. I bet Sylvia would put up a blog because she thought she should, but perhaps it would be spottily populated.
Maybe she’d delegate the blog to one of her assistants, perhaps the character in my novel, Lily Heller, who gets a job working alongside Sylvia.
Here’s my best guess about her subject matter:

Sylvia’s mission was to bring Anglophone literature to readers in France. She would make short posts to feature new books that had come into the bookstore.

She’d blog about the literary magazines such as Transition literary magazine that she carried in her shop Shakespeare and Company.

If we read Sylvia’s blog, we might also see reports of readings she held in her shop, like the one in 1937 with novelist Ernest Hemingway and poet Stephen Spender. (This is a scene in my novel that I have fictionalized.)

Sylvia might dish on the books she was reading, and would probably love sharing her opinions on them.

Sylvia would never blog about:

Herself or her private life. Sylvia was an intensely private person, and I imagine that she’d think any kind of personal blogging would be ridiculous.

She’d never gossip or spread news about her friends and their private lives.

She would never blog a novel because she would never write a novel.

It’s fun to imagine what someone in 1930s Paris would blog about, isn’t it?
What do you think Sylvia Beach would have blogged about? What do you think makes for a good bookstore blog?

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